He thought, I want to go back. In the pit of his stomach, a flutter of apprehension, excitement.
He reached down and let his hand touch the water in a rock pool. It was quite warm and glimmering from some faint phosphorescence and then, as it stirred, the briny smell came up into his nostrils, reminding him of all the summers of his childhood. There were limpets, rough and conical, clinging to the sides of the pool, and he rubbed over them with the pads of his fingers. Immediately, he was conscious of his own flesh, of the nerves beneath the skin; of the bone and muscle which obeyed him: clench, unclench, move this finger, bend that. His hands looked huge and pale under the water. He had never realized before how much he cared about his own body, simply because it was so familiar, because he knew better than he knew anything every shape and crease of it, the exact width of knuckle, the flatness of his fingernails. So that, when he imagined his hand torn off at the wrist it was not the thought of the pain which so terrified him, but simply the loss of a part of himself, something he had always known. He was his hand – and his legs and neck, ribs and groin. Yet the wound had healed well enough.
He tried to pull a limpet away and felt it sucking in hard, resisting him. He knew that in the end he would win, could prise under the shell and probe out the weak spot in its defences. For a second he rested his fingers on the ribbed surface. Then let go abruptly, ashamed. He got up and began to walk back, looking down at the pebbles that glistened, dark as glass, where the water touched them. The easy movement of his own long legs pleased him, he could have walked on for mile after mile, forever.
Going up the road from Bapaume that Saturday afternoon, after eleven days in the front line without relief, Hurstfield, one of his own platoon, had swayed, staggered and then fallen, and the others had hauled him up and marched him between them for a while, supporting his arms, telling him to move his feet, left right, left right, left right, so that he obeyed them, like a drunk being taken home. They had been marching since seven, had passed the far point of exhaustion, rested for a quarter of an hour, gone on, and in the end, Hurstfield seemed to get strength again, he shook off their hands and moved away a little from them. Roberts the Welshman had taken over some of his pack but now, seeing the look on Hurstfield’s face, handed it back to him without speaking. Hilliard watched tensely, riding alongside them until a message came up for him to go ahead and meet the Adjutant at the crossroads. He forgot about Hurstfield. He was tired himself, his head ached in the sun. But the men were walking.
As he came off the beach he heard it again, the distant boom, like an explosion at the end of a long tunnel. An owl hooted. So they had come back then.
Owls, ravens, hedgehogs, snakes – augurs of death and mischance. But he had seen none of them in Picardy. Only lizards basking on their bellies against hot stone walls, only flocks of magpies and larks, soaring up out of sight at the end of the day, only hard black beetles and, in the copse at Selcourt, a nightingale. He had gone for a walk along the canal bank and watched a kingfisher dive down to a fish.
Yet until this year, he had scarcely known the name of any tree, though there was countryside all around Hawton, he took no interest in the garden, perhaps because of his father’s obsession with it, certainly had never been able to distinguish one bird from another. The owls had only pleased him because, as a child, he had found an odd comfort in their nightly hooting, and because of the tiny bones of the animals they hunted and ate, and which he used to pick out of their pellets. An owl could swallow a fieldmouse whole, and still digest it. He washed the bones and saved them, they might be somewhere in a drawer, still, for his mother allowed nothing to be thrown away.
Cliff House stood back, long and low and pale in the moonlight. Around it, the lawns, about whose closeness of cut his father worried the gardener daily, the symmetrical flowerbeds, the perfectly pruned roses. He had been born here. The windows were tall and blank. It meant nothing to him. He felt a quiet misery, that he had somehow failed, because of that. Tomorrow he was rejoining his battalion. Did he not even mind, then, that he might never see this house again?
His head sang. Jesus God, help me…
Beth. Beth. He had always gone to Beth. He began to run.
For some reason, after having learned to swim early and well, he had for a short time become afraid of the water. He had said nothing about this, only not gone out very far, paddled about at the edges where his feet could keep in contact with the sand. It was the beginning of the holidays. Beth had watched him. She had never liked swimming.
‘Come on.’
‘What?’
‘Come on. I want you to come out with me. I want to swim as far as the headland and back.’ She had spoken very quickly, bobbing up and down like a cork in the water beside him. ‘Come with me.’
‘You don’t like it,’ John had said.
‘I want to go.’ Her face went blank, stubborn, so that she looked like their father. She wanted to help him.
In the end, he said, ‘It’s not too far.’ But he was doubtful.
‘I know it’s not, don’t I?’
They waited, swam a little way, only just out of their depth. The sea was milky green. If they went a little further, they would be able to see Cliff House, up on the slope behind the trees.
‘I want to go.’ And she had gone, pushing ahead of him in a slow breast-stroke, the movements of her arms very careful, so that he knew she was counting, as she had been taught. She had been far more afraid than he was.
‘Here I come! Here I come!’ He had swum hard and fast, not allowing himself to stop or think, and then they were side by side, out as far as the end of the headland, they could survey the whole of the bay, lying on their backs and floating on the soft mattress of the sea.
‘I can see the windmill.’
‘I can see the house.’
‘I can see father. He’s in a deckchair.’
‘He’s wearing his panama hat.’
‘He’s gone to sleep.’
‘I can see your bedroom window. It’s open.’
‘I can see the whole, whole world.’
‘I can see a bird on a currant bush. And it’s a sparrow. I can see its eyes.’
‘Liar!’
‘I can so!’
He dived down and opened his eyes under the water, looking into darker and darker blue-greenness.
‘John… John…’ Her voice came from very far away, sounding different, hollow. ‘John…’
He surfaced, bubbling. ‘It’s all right, stupid.’
‘You could drown. You shouldn’t do it.’
‘There might be a shipwreck under here. I might go down and see.’
‘Don’t, you’re not to… Oh, don’t…’ Her voice rose in anxiety.
He had laughed, circled her once, and then begun to make for the shore, knowing that she had had enough, and was even doubting if she could get back, though would not say so. She followed him at her own cautious pace. When they finally came up on to the beach she was breathing quickly, but she had raced before him up the path, said nothing about any of it.
He had never again been afraid of swimming. Beth was older than him, by eighteen months, she had been almost eleven then. Beth. Beth…
He began to pant, climbing the stairs through the dark house, his hands were trembling. He tried not to count over all the possible ways in which, after tomorrow, he was going to die. Beth. Beth.
‘BETH!’
She sat bolt upright in her bed, eyes huge and shocked out of sleep.
‘I wondered what on earth it was! You frightened me.’
Had she forgotten all the times in the past when he had come here like this, for comfort, in the middle of the night? He sat on her bed, still trying to get his breath, wiping a hand over his face.