‘Aaargh!’
‘Sorry, sorry!’
He had touched a nerve or else pushed his pick deep into a soft smudge of decay.
I was pale and sweaty. Rigid.
‘My god, Hugh . . . Jesus! That was agony.’
‘Sorry. I just touched that big filling at the back – upper right second molar.’
‘Is it rotten?’
‘No, no. There’s nothing wrong with the tooth,’ Hugh said, chuckling. ‘What you felt there was an electric shock. Two bits of metal touch and the saliva acts as an electrolyte. Ouch! It’s like a piece of silver foil when you break off a chocolate bar. You know, sticking to the chocolate. You start to eat and – a little electric shock. Nothing wrong with your teeth.’ He stepped back and ran his hands through his hair, smiling apologetically. ‘Anyway, let’s stop messing about and stick the thing back on.’
THE ELECTROLYTE
When I saw your face at the door
In a dancing dream of dervishes
It was like a probe touching a molar
(Electrolyte of love).
Then I saw you true.
The evening mist gathers in the valley
My hands I move
And fold it flat
Into a neat square bundle
And give it to you.
I’m sitting in my old bedroom at Claverleigh. I’ve just been in to see Crickmay to say goodbye. I’m off tomorrow – to France. The sound of Crickmay’s breathing is like some ancient wheezing pump trying to empty a flooded mine. Air and water intermixed.
He managed to gasp goodbye and squeeze my hand.
Outside in the corridor Mother seemed upset but under control.
‘How long will you be away?’ she asked.
‘I’m not sure. A month or two, maybe a bit longer.’ Massinger had not been precise. All duration would be determined by operational necessities and by Agent Bonfire.
‘He won’t be here when you come back,’ she said, flatly.
‘What will you do?’
‘I’ll be fine. I could spend twenty-four hours a day on the charity, if need be. I don’t know what I’d have done without it, actually. We’ve a staff of six now in the office at Lewes.’
‘That’s wonderful.’ I kissed her cheek and she took my hands, stepping back to look me up and down.
‘You look very handsome in your uniform,’ she said. ‘Your father would have been very proud.’
I feel hot tears in my eyes just thinking about this.
12. L’Officier Anglais
Munro and Lysander lunched in Aire, a dozen miles behind the front line. Apart from the fact that everyone in the restaurant was male and in uniform, Lysander thought, the gustatory and vinous experience was pretty much the same had they been there in 1912. They ate an excellent coq au vin, drank a carafe of Beaujolais, were presented with a selection of a dozen cheeses and rounded the meal off with a tarte tatin and a Calvados.
‘The condemned man ate a hearty meal,’ Lysander said.
‘I admire your gallows humour, Rief, but I have to say it isn’t called for. You’re going to experience no – or at least minimal – risk. We’re going to a quiet sector – only three casualties in the last month.’
Lysander wasn’t particularly reassured by Munro’s palliative: a casualty was a casualty. There might only be one casualty this month – and it might be him. And yet everyone would be applauding the increasing quietness of the quiet sector all the same.
They were driven by staff car to the rear-area of the southernmost extremity of the British lines, where the British Expeditionary Force’s First Army abutted the French Tenth Army. They passed through the town of Béthune and turned off a main road to drive down farm tracks until they reached the billet of the 2/10th battalion of the Loyal Manchester Fusiliers. A log-and-fascine road led them to a meadow fringed with apple orchards and filled with rows of bell tents. A sizeable field kitchen was in one corner and from a neighbouring pasture came the shouts and cheers and thumps of leather on leather that signalled a football match was taking place.
Lysander stepped out of the car feeling like a new boy on his first day at school – excited, apprehensive and faintly queasy. He and Munro were directed to the battalion H.Q. situated in a nearby requisitioned farmhouse, where Munro handed over the official papers to a taciturn and clearly disgruntled adjutant – who took his time reading what they contained, making little gasping sounds in his throat as he did so, as if they substituted for the expletives he’d have preferred to use.
‘Signed by Haig himself,’ he said, looking at Lysander with some hostility. ‘You’re to be “afforded every assistance” you require, Lieutenant Rief. You must be a very important man.’
‘He is,’ Munro interrupted. ‘It’s essential that everything is done to help the lieutenant in every possible way. Do you understand, Major?’
‘I understand but I don’t understand,’ the major said, laconically, rising to his feet. ‘Follow me, please.’
Well, that’s it, Lysander thought. That’s done it: Munro’s pushed it too far, it’s like being blackballed at a club – the major’s face was a picture of superior disdain. He took them along a brick path to a cow-byre where several camp beds were set up. He pointed one out to Lysander.
‘Dump your kit there. I’ll have a servant assigned. Dinner at six in the mess tent.’
‘Leave him to me,’ Munro said as they watched the major stroll off. ‘I’ll have another quiet word with our fine fellow.’ He smiled. ‘Scare him to death.’
Sometimes, Lysander thought, it was an advantage having someone like Munro on your side. All the same, he sat in silence throughout the meal in the mess tent. No other officer made any effort to engage him in conversation, but more, he thought, out of extreme caution than contempt. God knows what Munro had said. So he tackled his meal, a beef stew with dumplings and a steam pudding with custard, feeling full and uncomfortable but sensing it would only incur further opprobrium if he pushed his plates away half-eaten.
As soon as was polite, he went back to his camp bed in the cow-byre and smoked a cigarette.
‘Mr Rief, sir?’
He sat up. A sergeant stood in the doorway.
‘I’m Sergeant Foley, sir.’
They saluted each other. Lysander still felt a little strange being addressed as ‘sir’. Foley was a squat dense man in his late twenties, he guessed, with a pronounced snub nose. He had a thick Lancashire accent that somehow suited his muscled frame.
‘There’s a wiring party going up. We can follow them.’
They didn’t waste any time getting rid of me, Lysander thought, as he quickly gathered up a few essential belongings – a bottle of whisky, cigarettes, torch, compass, map, his kitbag with the two grenades, a scarf and spare socks. He left his raincoat behind – it was a warm clear night – and followed Foley out, feeling sudden misgivings stiffen his limbs and making his breathing a task he had to concentrate on. Keep calm, keep calm, he said to himself, remember it’s a quiet sector – all fighting is elsewhere – that’s why you’re here. You’ve been fully briefed and trained, you’ve studied maps, you’ve been given simple instructions – just follow them.
He and Foley stayed at the rear of the wiring party as they tramped up a mud road and turned off it into a communication trench, waist-deep at first but gradually deepening until breastworks on each side reduced the evening sky to a strip of orange-grey above his head.
By the time they reached the support lines Lysander was beginning to feel tired. Foley showed him to the officers’ dugout and there Lysander introduced himself to a Captain Dodd, the company commander – an older man in his mid-thirties with a drooping, damp-looking, curtain moustache, and two very young lieutenants – called Wiley and Gorlice-Law – who could barely have been twenty, Lysander thought, like senior prefects at a boarding school. They knew who he was, word must have been sent ahead, and they were polite and welcoming enough, but he could see them eyeing the red staff-officer flashes on his lapels with suspicion, as if he were contagious in some way. He was assigned one of the bunk beds and took his whisky bottle out of his kitbag as a donation to the dugout. Everyone had a tot immediately and the atmosphere became less chilly and formal.