‘Tell me,’ Barton said simply. He still lay on his stomach, hand dabbling gently in the water. His legs were very long, reaching back through the grass towards Hilliard.
He had been waiting for someone, just as Garrett had waited for him. Waiting for Barton. Though he had not known it. Long ago, he would have talked to Beth. Not now. There had never been anyone else close enough.
‘Go on. Tell me.’
Hilliard did so. It was not difficult, after all.
When he had finished, Barton lay without moving, his head resting on the grass now, both arms outstretched. Hilliard wondered if he had fallen asleep. His own voice seemed to have gone on for so long, he had never talked so much. But if he expected some comment, none came. For a long time, they were both silent. A breeze came from somewhere behind them, rustling the willow leaves like silk. A few of them drifted down on to Hilliard’s shoulders and into the water.
He did not want to have to move from here. All the anxiety he had felt for so many weeks, longer than he could really remember, had left him, but the effects of the wine he had drunk earlier were quite gone, too, this inner warmth was different and strange to him, it had come because of Barton. It was a thought he could not yet cope with.
Twenty-four hours ago he had been asleep across two wooden chairs, on a boat in the English Channel. It seemed years away, he had been another person. How often was he going to feel like that? He almost said his own name out loud, into the quiet orchard, as some kind of reassurance. ‘John George Glover Hilliard. Born 10 April 1894. Only son of George Alfred and Constance Hilliard, of Cliff House, Hawton, Sussex, England.’
He remembered the clear, black lettering on the label of the valise in the apple loft.
‘What’s your name?’
Barton rolled over lazily. ‘David.’ He had answered at once, because it did not seem an unusual question, though it was, for Hilliard knew the Christian names of very few of the officers here, and would not have thought to ask. He had no occasion to use them, and more, the question would have been regarded as an impertinence. For that matter, he himself might have reacted in the same way. Yet he had said, ‘What’s your name?’ to Barton. He was glad to have done so, glad he knew.
‘Had we better be getting back?’
‘I suppose so, yes.’
But for some time neither of them made a move.
‘I imagine it was fairly painful?’
Hilliard glanced up, startled. Barton was looking with interest at the red, rough-edged scar along his left thigh. It made him want to conceal it hurriedly, he felt ashamed in some odd way, it seemed a blemish, a flaw, for which he was accountable. The only people to look at it until now had been the doctors, and that was not the same thing. He himself had examined it, peering at it closely as he used to peer at scabs and bruises on arms and knees when he was a small boy, charting their progress from blue to brown to yellow, watching the thickening of the skin. He touched this shrapnel wound with the pads of his fingers, sitting on his bed at Hawton, and now Barton was looking at it with the same kind of curiosity.
‘You’ll see a lot worse than this,’ Hilliard said shortly, reaching for his pyjamas.
‘But that’s not the point, is it? I’ve never seen any shrapnel wound before, this is the first.’
‘You must have seen plenty of gore in your father’s surgery.’
‘That was different. Isn’t this different, for you? It’s your own injury, that’s the one you know about, that’s the one that counts. Only by that can you assess what other people suffer, surely. By the damage to your own flesh, by the amount of pain you feel.’
Hilliard thought, how does he know?
‘What happened?’
‘Not sure. Some bit of metal flying through the air.’
‘Oh come!’ Barton was laughing at him. ‘How did it happen?’
‘I’ve told you, I really don’t remember too clearly. One minute I was making my way along the trench, trying to get past a pile of pit props someone had left in the way – it was pitch dark – then a shell dropped somewhere behind us and it was a bit flying off that caught my leg. Nobody else was hurt. It all happens so quickly.’
‘Just like that?’
‘Most of it comes about just like that.’ Hilliard snapped his fingers. He thought of the deaths and injuries he had seen, not in battle but caused by the single, random bullet, by a careless accident, by sheer bad luck. One shell coming out of nowhere, through the blue sky of a May morning, singing down into a corner of a trench where Higgins was frying bacon and talking to a couple of men from Glazier’s platoon. All killed. Then nothing more that day, only the warm sunshine and ordinary jobs. Sergeant Carson had had his arms blown off demonstrating a new type of hand grenade at the Training Camp. So many pointless, messy, inglorious deaths, ‘just like that’. He resented them more than anything.
‘Will it disturb you if I keep the lamp on for a bit?’
Hilliard smiled. ‘I can sleep through most things.’ And so will you, he thought, glancing across to where Barton lay reading, The Turn of the Screw, propped on his elbow.
‘Oh, God…’ He spoke before he could stop himself.
‘What?’ Barton laid down the book at once. ‘What’s up?’
The last time he had lain in bed like this and looked sideways at the man beside him had been the night before he was sent home from the hospital, the night Crawford had gone away, without giving him anything to help him sleep, so that he had had to lie and hear the noises, look at the rows of humped shapes and feel the pain in his own leg, like a deep burn. Then, the Field-Gunner had stopped crying and spoken suddenly across the space between their beds, half-delirious, had begged Hilliard to talk to him, to help him, help him, to take him away.
‘Who are you?’ he had said. His face could not be imagined beneath the white bandages. ‘I don’t know… Please… what time is it? What time is it?’
‘Just after twelve.’
‘Is it day?’
‘No.’
‘Where is it?’
‘This is the hospital.’
‘No, no, where is it?’
Uselessly, he had said, ‘Shall I get the nurse to come?’
But the Field-Gunner seemed not to hear, he lay muttering words Hilliard could not catch, except now and then a fragment about ‘the green light, the green light’. Then, for a few moments, he had surfaced, his voice became clear and quite steady. He said, ‘Who are you?’
‘Hilliard.’
‘Artillery?’
‘No, I’m an infantry lieutenant. Look, you’d better get some sleep now, hadn’t you? If you can. I don’t think you ought to talk.’ He turned over himself.
The reply had come out high and urgent, half a cry. ‘Oh God, don’t go away, talk to me. They keep going away. Don’t you go. Please, talk to me, talk to me.’
Hilliard could not. He knew that he should have got out of his own bed and sat on the chair beside the Gunner, touched him, given him a drink, let the man know that he would stay there, would listen to whatever it was he had to say, to the incoherent words about the green light. He could not do it, he was too afraid. He had rung the bell and after a long time one of the nurses came, hurrying because they were busy that night, seven men had just been brought in, the survivors from an underground explosion near Artois, she had no time to sit with the Field-Gunner.
‘Try and keep him quiet. You can do as much for him as I can, just at the moment.’
Her footsteps went away. The Field-Gunner began to cry again very quietly, as though he had given up hope.