‘Mr Hilliard…’
‘Parkin.’
The man was panting, scrambling to his feet. ‘If you come over here sir, we can get through, there’s a space. We can get into the trees.’
‘Where are we?’
‘To the east a bit, I think, but I haven’t seen any of our own Company for ages. I came back to find someone. Captain Sparrow’s dead, sir, I was going to ask him what to do – I met him, he was sitting down, I thought… Only he was dead. Look, if we go this way.’
They seemed to have lost everyone, to be dodging only among dead bodies and great craters and mounds of turned-up mud and smoke, there might have been no other men left except those who were ahead, still firing the guns. Hilliard followed Parkin, they ducked and ran forward as they could. He wondered again how they were managing to stay alive. Then suddenly they came between the stumps of some trees, dropped down into a shell hole. Parkin scrambled out again.
‘We want to be a bit farther, sir.’
‘Mind we don’t get on to their wire.’
‘No, we’re to the left of it, I think, we’ll be all right in a yard or so.’
‘How do you know all this?’
‘Luck, sir, it’s all luck.’
‘You’re right about that.’
‘Here. In this hole.’
‘We can’t stick here forever.’
‘What else can we do for the time being, sir? There’s nothing. We’ve lost touch with everyone, we don’t know what’s going on, do we? We’ve got no orders and if we had what good would they be? It’d be hopeless trying to get back now. We’d much better sit tight and wait till dark and then have a go. This is a balls-up, sir.’
‘Quite.’
‘We’ve lost half the bloody Division.’
Hilliard leaned forward, suddenly giddy, tried to reach for his water bottle.
‘You’ve done something to your leg, sir, look…’
‘No.’
‘Well, it’s bleeding.’
‘I’d have known. It’s blood from all the wounded men we’ve been wading through.’
He lifted his head slowly and it felt like a dead weight. He glanced down. A huge patch of his trousers all round the left thigh was dark with blood. He had a sense of having been in this same place, and with this same wound, before, or repeating the same bit of time over and over again. His head swam.
‘I haven’t got a field dressing, sir, I used it up on someone else. But I’ll go and find somebody, I’ll get help.’
‘There isn’t anybody.’
‘I’ll get a dressing anyway. You can have it put on and then we’ll wait here till this lot dies down and I can try to get you back.’
‘Can you?’ It seemed unlikely. Hilliard was feeling no pain at all, only this sensation of lightness, of floating, so that his eyes would not focus and he heard Parkin’s voice as from a great distance down a tunnel.
‘Come on, sir.’
‘What are you doing?’
‘Get a bit further down in this hole, sir, you’ll be better off.’
Somehow, Hilliard slithered down on his back.
‘How are you off for water, sir?’
‘I don’t know.’
He felt the man put something to his mouth, swallowed twice, and tasted rum from his own hip flask, warm and curiously sweet, trickling down the back of his throat into his belly.
‘I’ll be back, sir.’
He wanted to agree but as he fell further down the side of the shell hole his face came up against something cold and soft and he felt himself sinking into a whirl of blackness and silence.
The first time he regained consciousness, the gunfire was still going on all around him but it sounded now to be mainly heavy shells. The air stank. He lay, trying to make out where he was, for a moment, and then as he came to, wondered what had happened to Parkin. It was almost dark. Hadn’t he been left out here some time in the morning? He sat up and was sick into the ground at his feet. He had been lying next to a dead man and on top of another – or perhaps more than one. A leg had fallen heavily across his own and when he tried to shift himself, the first real pain he had felt shot through his leg from the foot upwards, making him faint again. As he lost consciousness, he realized that he was thirsty. He could not reach around to find his water bottle.
This time he dreamed, and his dream was of swimming with Beth out beyond the point, in the bay at Hawton. The sun glittered and shone on the wrinkled surface of the water and he felt his body striking easily through it, felt a sense of jubilation, as he saw her moving in front of him. But when he caught up she turned, laughing, and it was not Beth after all, it was David Barton and they were not children, though the day was the same one that Beth had helped him swim out beyond the point because he was afraid. Looking back towards the house, he could see his father sitting in the deckchair on the lawn, wearing a panama hat tipped down over his eyes, hands folded in his lap, he could see the gardener going to and fro with the lawn mower. For a long time he swam slowly beside Barton, and then they lay on their backs and floated, looking up at the sky, pale as paint.
‘When we get back we shall have strawberries.’
‘The smell of strawberries is the most beautiful smell in the world,’ Barton said and Hilliard realized that it was true, that everything Barton said was true. He would never forget about the smell of strawberries, now. They went on floating and the sun shone, burning their skin, the house and the cliffs receded.
‘There’s my father,’ Hilliard said.
‘I like him.’
‘You like everyone.’
‘Don’t you?’
‘I can’t, I can’t. I want to be like you but I can’t.’
‘Oh no, you should be quite happy as you are.’
‘Why? How can I be?’
‘Because it’s easy.’
‘But I don’t like myself much.’
‘Oh, you’re all right, John, you’re all right.’ Barton was laughing. A gull flew over their heads, silver as a bullet, they watched it land and begin to rock on the water.
‘I’d like to be a gull.’
‘You are all right as you are. Listen, I know what I’m saying.’
Hilliard heard Barton’s voice in his ears sounding oddly distorted. ‘You’re all right, you’re all right.’ There was something else he wanted to hear, he wanted to know the answer to a question but he could not remember what it was. And where was Beth? Beth had been here with them, and was no longer here, where was she? She had not liked to swim so far out and he felt suddenly afraid, because he and Barton had not looked after her, had been so absorbed in themselves. Beth was a child, she was eleven years old, she needed them to look after her, most particularly because she was plain and afraid of the water.
On the lawn his father still sat asleep in the deckchair and in the sun-filled bedroom his mother stood before the mirror, admiring herself in the lilac dress and coat. For the wedding. For the wedding.
A terrible noise burst through his head.
His leg had gone numb. He was sick again.
Now it was completely dark and quieter, except for the odd burst of a shell somewhere far in the distance. He felt better, found his flask and drank the last of the rum and then ate two biscuits from his iron ration. But there was no water left in the bottle when he found that. He wondered if he could move, to look for one that might have been beside one of the dead men. When he tried, his leg was terribly painful, but after a moment or two he found that he could get used to it. What had happened to Parkin? Why hadn’t Parkin come back with the dressing? His trousers were stuck to the wound with dried blood and when he moved they began to tear away from it. He still had no idea when he had been hit. He hauled himself up on his hands, trying to get out of the shell hole, but it was raining again and the sides were slippery with mud, he could get no hold at all. His leg hurt so badly that he fell back again, his ears roared.