At his feet the rabbit has flung itself on to its side, and from its mouth there spurts a small cascade of inconceivably brilliant scarlet blood. Its back legs kick feebly, and, most heart-rendingly of all, so great is the pain of its starvation compared to the pain of its death wound that it continues trying to eat, its jaws moving ceaselessly.
It kicks again, and then the Major makes a mistake. He knows that really it is dead already, that it died instantly, but he wants it to stop kicking and chewing. He reloads the gun and places the gun barrel against the side of the rabbit’s head, right against the hideous globe of its left eye socket. He pulls the trigger and then leaps back in horror, because a thick shower of bright white pus has exploded out of its head and spattered his trousers, his jacket, his hands, the barrel of his gun. It had never occurred to him that the swelling had been anything other than a swelling. He walks backwards a few paces, sees that the animal is completely dead, wishes it, perhaps ridiculously, a safe homegoing to wherever it has gone, and walks swiftly back to the house, too upset for thought.
Joan has waited in the kitchen, and she sees him come in, his face white with distress. She puts her hand to his face, and he says in tones of quiet disbelief, ‘Its head was full of pus, and it exploded.’
She looks at him as he takes a paper towel and wipes down his clothes and the gun. ‘Go and change,’ she says. ‘I’ll put your things in the machine.’
The Major sits at the desk in his study, hands on his knees, looking out of the window at the laurels. A squirrel spirals up the oak tree, and a green woodpecker inspects its crevices for bugs. His clean clothes feel stiff and unyielding. His wife comes in with a cup of tea. It is her own blend, half Tetley tea bag and half Earl Grey. She puts it down carefully on his blotter and asks, ‘Are you all right, darling?’
He says, ‘It was very upsetting.’ He pauses, and then asks her, ‘Did I ever tell you about the German soldier?’
‘Which one, darling?’
‘When we were sent out to collect the papers from the dead.’
‘No, you didn’t tell me.’
He continues to look straight out of the window. ‘We’d been fighting for three days,’ he said. ‘We were all exhausted. No sleep. It was bloody hot. It had been hot for weeks. Appalling … very tough. Bloody hell, actually. Then the Germans withdrew, and my platoon was detailed to gather the papers from the dead. For the Red Cross. Send them back through Switzerland.’
He pauses in order to collect himself. ‘I found this body. In a foxhole. He was damned bloody fat, this German. I remember thinking he was too fat to fight, that the Germans must have been damned desperate to go round recruiting anyone as fat as that.
‘He had a nice belt, a black leather one, and it so happened that mine was buggered. Broken at the buckle. I was holding my trousers up with a string. Not very soldierly.
‘I tried to undo the German’s belt, but it was too tight, so I put my foot on his stomach to get some purchase. That was when I found out that he wasn’t fat, he was swollen.’
The Major continues to look out at the laurels. ‘I vomited. I’ve seen lots of corpses. They don’t seem like people, not even the corpses of your friends. But that was the first one that actually exploded.
‘Afterwards we looked through the papers. They were all love letters and pictures of girls. Piles and piles of them. We sat and looked at them and said nothing. He was called Manfred Schneider, the one with the belt. Up until that day I loved killing Germans. It was all I wanted to do. Nothing I’d rather. I had a passion for it. But after that I stopped hating them. After that I only killed for duty.’
Joan places her hand on his shoulder. He looks up at her and she can see that his eyes are glistening with choked-back tears. She strokes his thin grey hair, and kisses him lightly on the top of the head. Discreetly she turns and leaves the room. With his hands on his knees, his cup of tea cooling on the blotter, and his eyes brimming with a lifetime’s unsheddable tears, he looks out over the laurels, and remembers. He will never tell anyone, not even Joan, about the mercy killing that is sometimes all one can do for a hideously wounded friend.
THIS BEAUTIFUL HOUSE
I LOVE IT at Christmas. I just sit here at the end of the garden on top of the rockery, like a garden gnome. I don’t find the stones uncomfortable. I sit here and look at the house. It’s very beautiful, I always did think so. I grew up here, and I am still here now, although I spend much of my time out in the garden just looking.
Other people may not think it beautiful, but it’s beautiful to me mainly because I always loved it. I loved my childhood here, and I loved the house when I had to go abroad on military service, because it represented everything I was fighting for, and I loved it when I came back to Notwithstanding from Korea, and settled into the life I was born to. Here is the clump of bamboos behind which I used to conceal myself when playing hide-and-seek with my brothers and sister. Further up there on the left is a bird table that I made when I was at school. It’s amazing that it hasn’t rotted away by now. The lawn isn’t very smooth, there’s too much couch grass, but we used to set up a putting green on it in the summer, and it ruined my father’s scores at the real golf course because he kept hitting the ball a long way past the hole. Here is the big apple tree that was so easy to climb, and produced great Bramleys that my mother made into pies. One year we tried to make cider, but it was very sharp. We had rabbits in the orchard, in a big wire enclosure that was movable. They kept the grass mown if you remembered to move the cage around. Of course they’d escape quite often by burrowing underneath, and they’d go and raid the vegetable patch, but they came when you called them anyway. The cage started life as a chicken run, but we found the pullets too ill-natured. There used to be a modest fruit cage just here as well, and I frequently had to go into it to free the robins and blackbirds that got stuck inside. They would fly about in a silly panic, and didn’t know you were trying to be helpful. ‘Funny kind of fruit cage,’ my father used to say. ‘Keeps birds in rather than out.’
The house isn’t very old. It’s Edwardian, in the Surrey farmhouse style. I remember when the Virginia creeper and the wisteria were planted, and now they’re all over the walls. I don’t know who the architect was, but it’s a very conventional design. Most of the other family houses around here are quite similar. The first people to live in this house came down from the north. I think they were in textiles. Then it belonged to a writer who was quite famous in his time, but now no one’s even heard of him. Then it belonged to a retired naval officer and his wife, and then it was ours. I have so many happy memories. I don’t ever want to leave.
Inside there are five bedrooms. My parents had the one at the back. Mine was above the kitchen. Every morning the smell of frying eggs and sausages would get me out of bed in a good mood. My room wasn’t big, but it was big enough for my model aeroplanes to hang from the ceiling on string, and for my toy soldiers to have decent-sized battles. I had a little cannon that worked on a spring, and you could put ball bearings or matches into it, pull back the lever, release it and mow down the enemy. When I grew up I would find little ball bearings all over the place.
My brother Michael shared a room with my other brother Sebastian. They were twins, but not identical. My sister Catherine had the room opposite my parents, and sometimes I would creep into her room at night with a sheet over my head and give her a fright. Or I’d listen for when she went to the loo, and I’d lie down at the corner of the corridor and grab her ankle as she went past in the dark. It worked every time. Then my mother told me to stop, because it was unnerving being woken up by screaming in the middle of the night. Catherine used to get revenge by leaning over the banisters and spitting on my head when I was underneath in the hallway. It’s hard to imagine that she grew up to be so beautiful and refined, and married a baronet.