The Lie (21 page)

Frederick’s leg has stopped bleeding. That’s good. If that was the evening hate, it’s over. Time to go.

I’ve thrown away my rifle into the water at the bottom of the shell-hole where it will be no good to anyone. It was like throwing away part of myself. The knobkerry went a long time ago, I don’t even remember. I never had faith in it, any more than Sergeant Morris had. I’ve still got my knife, and Frederick’s revolver. You can be shot for throwing away your weapons. I can’t carry anything but Frederick.

We’re over the lip of the shell-hole, crawling through mud. Not too deep, thank God, not the kind that pulls you down. I’m crawling with Frederick on my back, my spine on fire from the weight of him. I keep having to stop and spit out the stuff that gets in my mouth. I can see the flash of guns and the trails of Very lights going up. I’m afraid of going round in a circle so I keep having to stop and check. German lines behind me. Ours ahead. I think I’m right.

We go on and on. I think we crawl for hours, half a yard, half a yard, half a yard. Frederick groans but he never lets out a cry. I feel as if I’m drowning. As if we’re sinking down to the bottom of the world together. We wallow through the darkness, bumping into things. I don’t know what the things are. I don’t want to know. Posts and wire is all I care about. There are dead men all over, out here in the darkness. This is where they live. You can bury them, but they rise up again with every bout of shelling. That’s someone else groaning, not Frederick. I hear the patter of a voice, reciting to itself:

‘Four times fifty living men

(And I heard nor sigh nor groan)

With heavy thump, a lifeless lump,

They dropped down one by one.

‘The souls did from their bodies fly,–

They fled to bliss or woe!

And every soul, it passed me by

Like the whizz of my cross-bow!’

It’s been dark for a long while now. The voice has gone away. Sometimes there’s a chatter of fire. Windy. None of it’s close enough to make that furze-fire noise in the air above us. Maybe it’ll be dawn soon. Stand-to. The morning hate, then the livelong day, and then the evening hate. All in order, like church services.

I have to rest, just for a moment. I lay my face down sideways, to keep my mouth out of the mud. Frederick crushes me down, but I can’t move him off me. We lie still for a long time. I must have fallen asleep, because the next thing I know, Frederick has rolled away. I dab around frantically, and there he is, lying on his back not two feet away, with rain on his face. I can feel wetness all over his skin, cold. But under it he’s warm, I know he is. The warmth has gone deep inside him, where he needs it. I whisper, ‘Frederick,’ but he doesn’t answer. I shuffle over, dig myself in under him and try to roll him back on top of me so I can crawl on. He rolls clumsily, too far, and topples over on the other side. I can’t get a proper grip on him, he’s so stiff and heavy.

I’m crying with the frustration of it. He doesn’t hear me. He’s not helping me now, the way he was at first. I know he won’t be able to keep himself on my back. All kinds of stuff surges in my head. The noise of the rain on the gunnera leaves above me. Our wigwam right and tight so we can peer out of it at the rain while we are dry.
We could live here for ever
, Frederick said. We looked at each other. The joy of it went up like a Very light.

‘Frederick!’ I say, covering his ear with my mouth. He doesn’t stir. He’s unconscious, that’s what it is, and no wonder. Better for him that way. I’ll have to go backwards, dragging him. I’ll get a hold under his arms, and shuffle along close to the ground so we won’t be too visible. It looks as if the dark’s thinning out, over to the east where the Germans are. Dawn’s the worst time. Everyone’s jumpy, firing off at anything that moves.

I feel Frederick’s face again. I thought it was wet with rain but it’s too sticky. It must be mud. His mouth is open. I feel round it for his breath against my hand, but my hand is so cold and numb that I can’t feel anything.

‘You’ll be all right, boy,’ I tell him.

I hadn’t reckoned on the wire. I know we cut ours. We went sideways down the line afterwards, like you do in the sea when the current’s dragging you to the diagonal. This wire hasn’t been cut and it’s thick as hell. There are gooseberries in it too.

I let Frederick down on to the earth. I know that I can’t drag him all the way back up to where we cut the wire. I’m done in, shaking, my skin pushing out sweat that freezes me. I turn my head aside to throw up on the earth, away from Frederick, choking out mud and vomit.

I suck in some deep breaths and then take my cheek off the earth, and wipe myself. I reach for Frederick and feel him all over to be sure he’s safe. I try to settle him close to the ground like I was settling him in a bed. I make sure his face is turned up out of the mud, and his mouth and nose are clear. He’ll be all right here. No one can see him. The wire hides him from our front line, and there’s no reason for Fritz to know he’s here.

‘You’ll be all right now, boy,’ I whisper to him. I tell him I’m going to crawl as fast as I can around the worst of the entanglement. There’ll be a way cut through it somewhere, for patrols. Once I’m through, it isn’t twenty yards to the fire-trench. I’ll be close enough to call out for help before they shoot me. Can’t call too soon in case a sniper finds me. Can’t call too late in case our sentry thinks I’m a dawn raiding party. Frederick’s head is on one side, facing towards me. I put my mouth back where his ear’s got to be.

‘Can you hear me?’ I say, the same as he said to me in the garden. ‘You’ll be all right, boy. I’ll be back with the body-snatchers before you know it.’ He doesn’t reply, but I’m sure he’s heard me. When a man’s unconscious, he’ll say afterwards that he remembers every word you said.

I move quickly without him, like a rat darting from hole to hole. I’ve got to get help. I must go as fast as I can, away from him. I keep my head down and close to the wire, and pray for a gap. I don’t think I’m anywhere near where we cut it, but I come to a place where it’s been shelled and I shove myself through it, under it, my arms around my head to shield it. The wire lashes and catches me but I tear myself away. I wriggle from post to post on my belly, the wire scourging me, my whole skin prickling for fear of bullets. And then I’m through, crawling on, downhill now and so quick and light I can barely believe myself, as if a hand is behind me, shoving me. I cry out:

‘Don’t shoot! For Christ’s sake don’t shoot! I been out here all night!’

I’m scuttering over the open ground on our side of the wire and nobody’s firing at me, and then I’m falling over the parapet, and still no one’s firing at me, and I’m alive as I bump down against the sandbags and crash into the water at the bottom of the fire-trench.

There isn’t time to wait for the body-snatchers. It’s still dark but it won’t be for long. Maybe there are dawny streaks here and there. There’s no chance they’ll find Frederick without me. Two men say they’ll go with me. I gulp rum as the order to hold fire goes down the trench. They know the way. We scuttle back, canted low to the ground, ducking this way and that through the wire. It’s getting lighter by the second and the lumps of darkness are turning into dips and shell-holes.

I see Frederick, twenty yards ahead. He hasn’t moved. If you didn’t know he was there you’d never find him. You’d think he was part of the earth.

‘There!’ I whisper, pointing. ‘There he is.’

‘Where?’ They turn to me, their faces grey and grainy now. I see how much the darkness has weakened.

‘There!’

I remember that. I don’t see or hear the shell-burst. One minute I see Frederick. The next I am punched into the earth.

We survived, the three of us, because there was a slight ridge in the ground between us and Frederick. So I couldn’t have seen him, even though I was right about where he was. It was the blast that threw me back.

If I’d dragged him even a bit farther, a few yards, twenty yards, Frederick would have lived too. He’d have been over that little ridge. I can’t remember why it was that I left him just there, exactly in that place. Why did I do it? I crawled away from him so fast, like a rat flicking from hole to hole. I was fetching help for him.

For a long time after the shell-burst I didn’t hear anything. I felt the rain of earth, not cold but warm, sticky to touch, going on and on. It pattered down all over me.

They got me into a dugout and I had tea with rum in it. I didn’t know why my clothes were rags on me. I was black all over, too, without knowing it. I could see the eyes of the man opposite, moving in his black face. I thought: He’s corked his face. I sat there until I started to shake so much I had to curl up like a sowpig. They laid me on a blanket. I’ve never felt silence like it, as thick as night, coming down over me. I tried to say that I wasn’t wounded, but I couldn’t hear my own voice. A sergeant I didn’t know bent over me and his mouth opened and shut as if he was drowning. I said your name but I couldn’t hear it. The sergeant’s face was close and then it was distant, and I put out my hand to stop him going, full of terror that he hadn’t heard me. I cried out your name again and again but it was like crying out in a dream where there is no sound. I could not wake myself, and the sergeant was already moving away, as if he knew everything that he needed to know.

14

The value of concealment cannot be overestimated.

THE THING THAT
stopped the furnace from lighting is simple, as it turns out. The cold tap that feeds the water tank has been turned off. Although the furnace is a warm-air-duct system, it also heats the water and there is a safety valve. It shuts down the system if the tank is empty, so that it can never boil dry.

It was too complicated for Josh. The kind of system that a man with too much time and money on his hands would come up with, and leave behind for people who don’t understand it. I come on the cold-water tap by chance, and think it strange that it would be turned off, when the system was built to feed every hot-water pipe in the house.

I shuffle myself out of that tunnel easily enough. I was making it out narrower than it really was, in my mind. Panicking. Of course Frederick was never there, but when I come out I feel different.

I open the cold tap as far as it will go, and then set about lighting the furnace. I don’t know the proper way of it, but everyone knows how to light a fire. I open the bottom vent wide, to give it a good updraught, and lay the fire in order. The flame catches, such a thin blue thing that you wouldn’t think it’d come to anything, but of course it does. It licks all around the kindling, tasting it, then goes up with a roar you’d never hear from an open fire. I squat beside it, feeding it until its insides are red. When it’s safe to do so I close the vent and fill the furnace full of coke, enough to keep it going all night. How Felicia is going to feed and empty it, I don’t know. She’ll have to get Josh in more regularly, or else I’ll do it for her. At any rate, she’ll have her warm house, for herself and the little one.

The smell in the furnace room changes. It’s warm and cokey now, with smoke in it. This is how it always used to smell, so that we’d creep in here for comfort on a cold day. The ventilation system is good. I check everything, as far as I am able. He was a proper engineer, Mr Dennis, one of those inventors who made the mines and the machinery that was in them. They made dynamite and pumps, steam engines and safety fuses. They made their fortunes too, out of their cleverness, or at any rate they made fortunes for the men who had the money to invest in their inventions. Maybe if the war had gone on another ten years, all our trenches would have turned into tunnels, deep underground, like the mining tunnels. There was plenty of work for engineers out in France. We could have lived there like rats, had our children like rats, watched them learn.

The furnace will want riddling, stoking and filling night and morning. I make a note to come down and mend that chicken wire too, in case a bird flies in and does mischief. I have no idea what time of day or night it will be when I go up to Felicia, like a miner coming out of the earth.

Felicia is studying in the kitchen, elbows on the table, hands cupping her face.

‘Jeannie’s having her nap,’ she says as I come in. ‘You’ve been down there a long time.’

‘I’ve got that furnace fixed,’ I say, and she actually jumps up, scattering her papers, and claps her hands together.

‘You haven’t!’ she says.

‘I have. Come here.’

There’s no heating vent in the kitchen: it wasn’t necessary, with the heat coming from the slab. I take her out to the hall and hold my hand over the vent in the polished floor, in the corner. Sure enough, the air is starting to come up warm. Felicia kneels beside me, and spreads out her fingers to catch the heat.

‘That’s wonderful, Daniel,’ she says. ‘I thought you’d never get it going.’

‘Give it half an hour for the tank to heat through and you’ll have hot water too, as much as you like.’

I have never felt so proud of anything, as if I’d invented the furnace, the ventilation system, the ducts and all of it. I look up and notice that the sun is flooding through the coloured glass in the fanlight over the front door. It’s a beautiful day. These spring days can be as good as summer, when the wind drops. I can’t help smiling at the thought that the furnace is working again, just when Felicia won’t be needing it. I look down at my hands and see that they are filthy. Most probably my face is, too.

‘You’ll need hot water to wash,’ says Felicia, and we go back into the kitchen. She swings the kettle off the range, unhooks it and hands it to me with a pot-holder.

In the jollyhouse I pour cold water into hot. I look at my face in the mirror, almost believing that I’ll find it blackened, but there’s only a bit of dirt from the furnace. They have fine soap that smells of lavender. I work up a lather, then swill my face and arms and dry myself carefully on the roller towel. As an afterthought I wet my fingers again and comb my hair into place with them, before going back to Felicia.