He had been unhappy at home, where he could talk to no one, nobody knew, where they gave dinner parties and agreed about politics, where old men aired their military opinions and he could not join in, only sit there, staring at them, and then down his food, in disbelief. He had argued twice, bitterly, with his father. But after that, stayed silent. He had gone to London and wandered hopelessly about the streets, eaten in the club and listened to what they were saying there, too, had seen that life went on: flower-sellers sitting around Piccadilly, young women with parasols strolling in the sunshine through the Green Park, commissionaires in uniform, opening the doors of grand hotels. Uniform… He had felt a tightening in his head. Spoke to no one. Returned home. On the lawn under the cedar tree, his mother poured china tea for the ladies who came on Wednesdays to knit, grey and green socks and mittens and helmets, for the coming winter at the front. They turned their heads to watch him as he walked, limping slightly, up the gravelled path. The shadows were long and black, against the brightness of the sun. He had so hated being here.
But there? Would he rather be there again? Or even where Crawford was, far behind the front line, standing at the foot of beds, hundreds of beds. For it had gone on, grown worse, throughout that summer. Crawford had known what they all knew. ‘We hear things.’
Although, in England you could not tell exactly what was happening, only the official reports came through to the newspapers, telling nothing. He read them, read between the lines, read the Casualty Lists. Imagined. Knew.
Knew that he had been wrong, unfair to Crawford, that there was no place for such petty feelings now. Could he have stood it himself, night after night in the military hospital, hearing the terrible noises? He should not continue to dislike Crawford.
This was how it went on, he felt himself changing daily, felt himself to be old, twenty, thirty, fifty years older than when he had gone out in April. Hardened, too. He knew. Everything. There were no secrets. He scarcely recognized the person he had once been, the person his family seemed to remember.
He did not want to go to sleep. He ordered himself not to, and so it would work, the old, childhood trick. He turned his head on the pillow, keeping his eyes open.
It did not work, for he was conditioned, now, to obeying, not countermanding orders. Ten. Fifteen. Twenty. ‘Go to sleep!’ He slept.
But at first, he dreamed only of horses, standing beside a hawthorn hedge in winter. The dark twigs were laced over with frost. There were four or five horses, and the breath came out of their nostrils and rose to hang and freeze, whitening on the air. He heard the soft thud of hoof on hard earth and the metal bits champing. Their muzzles were like the soft backs of moles.
He half woke, turned over. Horses? The first time he had ridden a horse was out across the Wiltshire Downs from the Training Camp, early that year. He had written so, in a letter home.
I’m settling down quite well here. We’re a mixed bunch but we get along. Some of it’s far pleasanter than I’d expected. For instance, I’m riding a horse for the first time in my life, and enjoying it greatly.
His mother had written back at once.
You are quite wrong about the riding, John. When you were four you rode a donkey on the sands at Eastbourne. Indeed, there is a photograph of you somewhere, sitting on a donkey and looking pleased. You were wearing a blue sun-hat. So you have certainly ridden before.
He had thought of recounting it, as a funny story, to Mason-Godwin, who shared the hut with himself and Archer. But did not do so in the end, because it seemed disloyal, Mason-Godwin was not a friend. Was humourless. A neat man.
That was the first time he had wished for Beth, for he could have begun to tell his sister the story and she would have at once supplied the ending, laughed with him, knowing their mother.
He would like to see her. But he felt no nostalgia for Hawton, then or later, and had been ashamed of that at first. He was indifferent to home, to mother or father. He disliked neither of them, but did not particularly miss them. Nor had he any ties with friends or his own past. All around him, the men of B Company told stories, about mothers and wives and friendly neighbours, became sentimental towards evening, in the billets at Selcourt, sang. Hilliard read their letters for censoring and passed over the conventional phrases of love and longing with curious detachment. Though certainly he looked forward to getting the mail that came to him, as much as any of them did, looked forward to his mother’s parcels, and the letters full of moral encouragement, and local gossip. Anything that broke the monotony, or the fear.
But he missed his sister. Beth’s letters were rather formal, disappointing. Communication between them had never been stated, they had relied upon thoughts and moments of humour, taken one another for granted. Were shocked by separation. The letters said nothing.
For a while, half-sleeping again, he still heard the gentle tossing of the horses’ heads, saw their breath smoking, saw ice meshed with cracks across a puddle.
Outside in the darkness, a hundred yards away, the soil became paler and drier, became sand, and the path led down to the beach.
His leg cramped suddenly, jerking him awake, but then at once he fell heavily asleep again, a hand came over his face, thick, moist and cold as an ether mask, and forced him down into the nightmares.
By day, walking about the garden or along the beaches in the hot sun, he had tried to remember the tiredness of the trenches, the lack of sleep that tipped him over into hysteria, to remember the longing for a mattress, sheets, a feather pillow. And there they were, on his own bed, in his own room. For three and a half weeks, he had been trying not to sleep.
The nightmares rose up through him in waves, like bouts of nausea, and at their crest, burst open and spilled over one another on confusion. Tomorrow, he was travelling to rejoin the battalion.
As he came awake the second time, he heard himself cry out. Had anyone else heard him? He sat up quickly, to shut out the sound of his own heart, thumping against the pillows, the rush of blood through his ears.
The day they had taken the German trench, they found the bodies piled on top of one another in layers, like sandbags, making a wall.
Jesus God, help me…
It was very quiet in his room. He moved his arm over the mound of quilt and blanket, and the memory came back to him of the soft bodies. And then, the soft bolsters through which he had had to thrust a bayonet every morning that spring. Bayonet practice had been the only thing he could not take, at the Training Camp. He hated the look of the blade, and the click as you fixed it home, the idea that it was somehow an extension of his own arm. Rifle shooting had been different, a skill to master and almost a matter of pride, to aim through the pale, clear light of March, across the open field to a neat target. He found that he was rather good at shooting. But not the bayonet.
The sweat was cooling on his back. The worst thing in his nightmares was always the smell, the sweet, rotten trench smell, of soil and chlorine and blood, and the mustard gas like garlic. His bedroom window was open and the room was full of the scent of roses, coming up from the warm garden. A sweet smell, and curiously like some cream or powder in a jar on his mother’s dressing table. A sweet smell.
He pushed the bedclothes away, retching, leaned over the washbasin and felt the walls of his stomach clench uselessly. Only a little water came up into his mouth, tasting bitter. He ran the tap and rinsed his mouth out, splashed his face. Shivered. Yet he had never been sick in France, not even felt sick, and only once had he had to turn his face away at the sight of a wound. He did not retch at the real things, only the memory of them, here in his old room above the rose garden.