Tomorrow, he was going back, and he would rather that than go back now to his bed. He had to get out of this room. He could still smell the roses.
It was somehow reassuring just to be putting on his clothes, to feel cotton and Shetland wool against his skin. He went out, walking on the grass in case the crunch of his feet on the drive woke them, and his mother should call out or come down, urging him back to bed, to sleep.
He went between the fruit trees into the copse, and took the path leading down to the beach. It was very warm, the sky clear and pricked all over with stars. First he heard the soft hiss and suck of the sea, and then saw it, thin and silvered as a snail’s trail where the moon lay along its edge.
The tide was right out, so that he had to wade through mounds of loose sand before it became damp, firm and satisfying under the soles of his feet. It was a wide bay, curved between two wooded tongues of land, and the coast continued like this, open and gentle, for more than twenty miles, before the cliffs grew steeper and more rocky, the currents dangerous. He lit a cigarette and the striking of the match, on open ground at night, made him panic, turn and look behind him, before he remembered where he was. He threw the match into a pool between two ribs of sand. Then, he began to walk slowly along the water line, no longer afraid, but poised between a sense of reassurance, at the sound of the night sea, and despair, because he had been at home and unhappy for three and a half weeks, he cared nothing for any of them, could explain nothing. He was simply waiting. For?
His mind filled up suddenly with ordinary details, about his journey back tomorrow, about what he should not forget to take with him, things he had promised people – a bottle of old brandy, chocolate, a good torch, a pair of wire cutters that would actually cut wire, Gilbert and Sullivan music for Reevely, who sang so badly and had such ambitions: he wondered where he would find his battalion, where they would be going to next, who was left. He thought – I want to go back. For there was nothing for him here.
‘You must go across to The White Lodge,’ Constance Hilliard had said, during the first week of his leave. ‘The Major is so anxious for you to go and have a talk to him, he feels so out of things. He doesn’t see so well nowadays. You must be very patient with him. I have told him that you will be coming.’
Up the short, ill-kempt drive, then, past the kennel where the bulldog lay as it had always lain, and snarled at him and snuffled up its thick nose, an evil dog, smelly, old, fat. Up to the blue door.
‘He has always taken an interest in you, always. He used to give you sweets when you were only a toddler. You won’t remember that.’ He remembered.
‘He is looking forward to a long talk with you.’
The Major who had only daughters, five daughters, one of whom was left to keep house so inefficiently, and attend Constance Hilliard’s knitting parties. She smelt, too, as the bulldog smelt and the dim hallway and the Major’s own study. An old smell, faintly rancid.
What would he find to say to the Major?
‘Pity you weren’t a cavalryman.’
‘Oh, I’m happy where I am, on the whole.’
‘Pity.’
‘I do ride. We have horse transport.’
‘You should have been a cavalryman, you’ve got a good long leg. Far and away the most useful, cavalry, always were. You’re only clearing a way for them now, of course, you do realize that?’
Clearing a way.
‘Pity you’re not a cavalryman. Still… Come with me while I feed the dog. I always feed the dog about now. What time is it, exactly? Still, you’ll be back again before Christmas, before the year’s out. Yes. All be over. Hold that dish steady. I have to cut the meat up a bit, he hasn’t the teeth he once did, have to help him on. Come with me. Look here, you’ve no cause to hang behind, he’s harmless isn’t he? Look… You remember him well enough, don’t you, you used to come here from school a year or so ago – he’s harmless.’
The dog heaved on to its legs and strained at the chain. Hilliard stood back from the smell of its body, as it sweated in the autumn sun.
‘Given you long enough at home with your feet up though, haven’t they? You seem to be all right. Don’t mind the dog. He takes his time, he isn’t so good managing his food as he used to be. Likes me to stand with him, you see. Had you no ambition to go for the cavalry?’
The Major had offered him tea, and when it came, into the close-windowed study, he had only been able to drink, though the Major ate hugely, chicken and tongue sandwiches, currant loaf, éclairs, slapping the food noisily about his mouth. Hilliard looked out of the window. The White Lodge was a pink bungalow, in need of repainting. Thistles and dock had seeded themselves among the currant bushes of the garden.
‘Seen anything of the Russians?’
‘I’ve been in France.’
‘No, no.’ The éclair oozed cream over his fingers and he sucked them. ‘No, Russians. Don’t you read your papers, keep up to date? They’re here, the country’s full of them. Well, ask Kemble down at the station, he sees the trains go through at night, troop trains full of them, he’ll tell you. I thought you’d know all about it.’
‘Would you mind if I opened the window?’
‘I get rheumatism. It’s the damp. The dog gets it too, come to that. I get bronchitis in the winter.’
The window stayed shut. Over the top of the hedge, straggling with convolvulus, Hilliard saw the thin gold line of the sea, and the heat shimmering in between.
‘Cavalrymen always were more highly thought of.’
When he left, he took in great gulps of air, but it was not fresh, even outside, it was dusty, old, burned-up air, the end of summer. The dog heaved, growling deep inside its massive belly.
‘You’ll be back here before Christmas. They know what they’re doing.’
He stood at the broken gate, unable to see Hilliard beyond the first few yards of the road.
‘The Major always asks after you, John. He was a fine soldier in his day He takes an interest in you, a pride, even. He didn’t have a boy of his own. It’s a pity he doesn’t see so well now. He isn’t old, you know, not so very old. He feels left out of things. It’s a great pity.’
Half a mile on, he came to a small cluster of rocks, and sat down. He did not notice that they were damp, from the seaweed trailing over them, he was so used, now, to physical discomforts. The first night they arrived at the training camp, they had slept in a field because there was confusion over hut accommodation, too many officers sent to this one place. They had a groundsheet and one army blanket each. It was early March, bitterly cold. In the morning, they rose like shadows, scarcely able to see one another at ten yards distance, through a thick mist. The grass was soaking wet, their blankets and valises and the overcoats in which most of them had slept were wet. All the admonitions of childhood had come back to him, about damp feet and the perils of fog to the lungs, he had waited for pleurisy, bronchitis, pneumonia. He did not even catch cold, and had not been ill once, the whole time there, or in France, had felt, indeed, more than usually well, with an odd lightheadedness. The shrapnel wound in his thigh had healed very quickly.
The sea moved about, turning over and back upon itself at the shore line. Then, he thought that he could hear, even from so far away, the thudding of the guns. But there were so many noises now, imagined or remembered, filling his head as he walked about the lanes and fields beyond Hawton that summer, he could no longer trust his own judgement.