‘I’m going to write out a neat little notice. PLEASE LOWER YOUR HEAD. I shall get Coulter to nail it up, else Hilliard and I will have our brains bashed in before we get near any guns.’
He was still smiling. Hilliard stiffened, waited for someone to express, by a look or gesture, disapproval of the remark. For did they want to be reminded of the front line, of skulls cracked and brains spilled, here, tonight and by this new young subaltern, who had seen nothing, knew nothing?
He felt himself suddenly ready to defend Barton, as he might defend a younger boy at school who had blurted out something because he did not yet know the form. He thought, we need him, he has something none of us have, we need him to stay here, just as he is, to sit here night after night, telling us his stories, or nodding in that way he nods when someone else talks, sympathetic, happy to yield the floor – liking us. For there is little enough left of what he has. And what is that? What is that?
He caught Barton’s eye and Barton smiled. The C.O. was talking. Hilliard looked away, filled with unease.
The glasses and cutlery were cleared, Garrett brought papers, a map, he had things to tell them. Barton listened with great concentration, his body completely still, head turned towards the Colonel. Hilliard looked at him once and then did not do so again. He thought, what is it?
It was gone ten o’clock when they broke up from the conference around the dining table, and Hilliard wanted to get outside, after the wine he had drunk and the stuffiness from oil lamps and tobacco smoke. In one of the two large sitting rooms of the house, which served as an officers’ mess, someone had put on a gramophone record of The Mikado. Upstairs in his valise, there was ‘The Favourite Selection from Gilbert and Sullivan,’ bound in green cloth with gold lettering on the cover, bought as a present for Reevely, who had sung so badly and who was dead. Hilliard wondered what he was going to do with the music now.
He stood for a moment in the doorway of the farmhouse. From the stables, the sound of buckets clanking, as the horses were fed and watered for the night: from a barn, some of the men, singing; someone shouted to the dog. He stepped out on to the cobbles and breathed in the smoky smell of night. Someone came up behind him in the doorway.
‘Do you play cards, Hilliard?’
Captain Franklin. His face was curiously expressionless. He had hair and moustache of a pale brown, like gingerbread.
‘I don’t really, sir.’
‘Not even whist?’
‘I’m no good at it.’
‘No good at bridge then, I suppose?’
‘I’m afraid not.’
‘Pity. We need someone to make up a four. Barton’s no use either.’
‘Sorry.’
‘All right.’
Hilliard felt that it was not all right.
‘Are you going out?’
‘I think I need to stretch my legs, yes.’
‘You might walk over to the stables for me, see if Preston’s there and ask him to keep an eye on my horse’s leg. He’ll know.’ He paused for a moment, and then added in the same tone, ‘If you’re going that way.’
‘Of course.’
Hilliard was irritated, he felt that the Adjutant had been putting him to some sort of test, because the message sounded unnecessary, and in any case he could perfectly well have sent his batman across with it. It had been mid-way between an order and a request for Hilliard to do him a favour. But then, there was no reason why he should not, in fact, be ‘going that way’.
The stables were warm and the smell of hay and manure was nostalgic to him, even though his acquaintance with it only went back as far as that spring, in Wiltshire. They were good stables here, roomy and solid. The company’s horses did not seem to be so overcrowded as the men.
He opened the half-door and stepped inside. A Tilley lamp stood high up on the window ledge.
‘Mr Hilliard!’
‘Hello, Preston, how are you?’
The usual questions, the usual replies. But he was glad that here was someone he knew still left.
Preston had been a stable boy at Newmarket, and Hilliard suspected that he was under age when he joined up the previous year. But he looked after the Company’s horses as though they were all being carefully primed for the next race. Hilliard had once asked him if he did not feel these animals to be greatly inferior to the thoroughbreds he was used to. Preston had looked shocked. They were horses, so it was all one, they were what he cared about.
‘Captain Franklin wanted me to give you a message?’
‘Yes, sir?’
‘Apparently there’s something wrong with his horse’s leg?’
Preston did not reply, but turned away and picked up a bucket. The animals moved about, humped against their stalls, tossing their heads up now and again quietly.
‘Anyway he wanted you to keep an eye on it.’
Preston was slight, with a thin face and quick movements. He had little personality and little to say for himself, unless it were on the subject of horses, but there was an air of cleverness about him. He preferred to be in the infantry, though he could have gone into transport, where he would have had more to do with horses and less with everything else. Hilliard sensed that he either resented Franklin’s message or was scornful of it, but his face gave nothing away, nothing was said at all.
‘We’re for the front again next week, aren’t we, sir?’
‘Are we?’
‘So they say.’
‘You seem to know all about it.’
Preston slapped the thick flank of a horse. It champed on at the hay basket, unperturbed.
‘Well, I shan’t mind, I like being where there’s something going on, I suppose. I get fed up here, waiting around.’
‘Were you at Neuville?’
‘Oh yes, sir.’ He sounded casual. ‘You missed all that, didn’t you? Never a dull moment!’
Hilliard could not take it in. Perhaps Preston had been in one of the quieter bits? But no, none of them had because there had been no quiet bits that summer. Was he unaffected, then? Did he think nothing of what he had seen? Was he blunted, or simply resilient? It could be that he was unimaginative. But you had not needed imagination.
‘You were in Parkinson’s platoon, weren’t you?’
Preston glanced over his shoulder as he reached for the Tilley lamp. It swung, flickering momentarily over the eyes and nostrils of the horses. ‘That’s right, sir. There were just two of us left, me and Andrews.’ He lifted the lamp up and moved it along the line of animals, taking a last look at each of them in turn. As he did so, his expression altered.
‘Most of these have come to us new,’ he said, ‘we lost all the others. They’ve no right to make horses suffer in a war, not the way those did. They don’t choose to come out here, do they? All I do is try not to think about it, so much. It bothers me, thinking about it, sir.’
His voice was the same, the flat, Cambridgeshire accent, and his face looked ferret-like, seen in profile above the lamp. He means it, Hilliard thought, he just means what he says. That he tries not to think about the dead horses.
It did not seem wrong, then, that this should be so. He had forgotten how much he himself had come to like the horses.
‘Had you no ambition to go for the cavalry?’
He had not, for he saw no point to it, in this war, but none of that would have made any sense to the Major.