“I’m fine. The CO says you’re to find me a job, until I can fly.”
“Oh. That’s what you’re here for, is it? I thought it was this.” Brazier opened a desk drawer and took out an envelope. Paxton took it and tore it open and then stopped. “It’s not from O’Neill, is it?” If it was from O’Neill he didn’t want to see it. Not yet; perhaps not ever. Brazier shook his head. Paxton pulled out a pair of photographs.
“Colonel Bliss said you might as well have them. He said they’re a bit grisly for his taste.”
Paxton grunted, and shoved the pictures into a tunic pocket.
For a long moment they sat and looked at each other.
“So you’ve had a taste of war,” Brazier said. “Does it suit your palate?”
“It’s a bit salty,” Paxton said. “Actually I don’t mind the taste so much as the noise. Don’t those bloody guns ever stop?”
Brazier found an empty pipe and used the stem to scratch an eyebrow. “I can remember a time when you were quite proud of our guns,” he said. “You quite enjoyed them, in fact.”
“I can remember a time when the poor bloody infantry were going to walk across No-Man’s-Land and capture the Boche front line. Nice quiet stroll after breakfast, so everyone said.”
“We’ve just captured their front line, so the papers say. Not all of it, but quite a lot. Took rather longer than we thought.”
“Because of the machine-guns.”
“Because of the dugouts. Fritz is a wily bird. He’d dug a great number of very deep dugouts, twenty feet down in the chalk. Thirty feet, some of them. Very, very strong.”
“And that’s where he kept his machine-guns.”
“So I’m told.” Brazier stuffed tobacco into his pipe. “You live and learn, you live and learn.”
Paxton shifted his arm in its sling. The damage was beginning to throb and burn. “But why on earth are we going on with the battle? The stupid plan failed, so why…”
“Because,” Brazier said. “Because Tweedledum, said Tweedledee, had broke his nice new rattle. It was time to have a battle, therefore a battle we must have.” He gazed at Paxton, who was looking disgruntled. “Not good enough,” Brazier said.
“It’s a load of fucking bollocks, adj.”
“I don’t know, Pax. Nothing seems to please you today. You don’t like being shot, you don’t approve of cock-ups in battle, you didn’t even seem to enjoy looking at your own souvenir snapshots.”
Paxton sniffed, and looked away. “That was just a kill,” he said. “Two poor sods in a flamer, that’s all.” He stood up. “Have you got anything for me to do?”
“I don’t suppose you feel like inspecting the men’s latrines.”
“No.”
“No. Well then, get your strength back and see me tomorrow.”
Paxton went out and closed the door. Lacey looked up from his work. “How was the hospital?” he asked.
“Full of blokes with bits missing from them.”
Lacey nodded. “I understand that since the war began the artificial limb industry has made great strides.”
Paxton rubbed his left eye with this left hand and stared bleakly at Lacey.
“Sorry,” Lacey said. “It wasn’t meant to be a joke.”
“Joke?” Paxton said. “What’s a joke? I wouldn’t recognise a joke if it bit me in the backside.” He walked to the door and leaned against its frame.
“Is there anything I can provide?” Lacey asked.
“No.” Paxton looked up and watched an FE climbing in a wide, easy spiral until it bored him. “Yes. Yes, there is. Can you get me a car? I can’t ride a motorbike, you see. Car and driver.”
Lacey said it might take a little while, an hour or so. Paxton told him there was no hurry, he would probably be in the mess.
He walked to the mess, slowly because the afternoon was hot and still, and ordered lemonade. Plug Gerrish was reading a newspaper. “Same old tosh,” he said.
“Same old tosh,” Paxton agreed.
After a while Spud Ogilvy came in, his flying boots folded below the knee, and carrying his sheepskin coat. “Stinking hot,” he said. “D’you mind?” He took a long drink of Paxton’s lemonade.
“Kellaway said you’d gone west.”
“Kellaway’s a bloody idiot, isn’t he?” Ogilvy threw his coat onto a chair and flopped down on a sofa. “God, I’d give a fiver for a nice cool swim.”
Paxton waited for someone to say the obvious thing but nobody did, so he said it himself. “What’s wrong with the pool?”
“Out of order,” Gerrish grunted, and took his cap and went out. Paxton looked at Ogilvy, but Ogilvy seemed to be asleep; at least there was a newspaper over his face. Paxton decided to go and see for himself.
Flies followed him across the aerodrome, and through the gate into the next field. It was a nuisance having only one hand to flap at them. They were obstinate, constantly touching his ears and eyebrows and lips, until he tied two corners of a handkerchief together and wore it like a mask.
There was a Casualty Clearing Station in the field: a cluster of khaki tents, some the size of marquees. From time to time they quivered in the heat-haze. Ambulances came over a distant rise, rolled down to the CCS, unloaded and went away by a different route. From the back of the CCS a tender drove along a chalk-white track to where the swimming pool had been. Paxton stood in the shade of a tree and watched all this for perhaps ten minutes. He didn’t want to go and see what had happened to the pool. He knew what had happened to the pool. On the other hand he didn’t like to think he wasn’t brave enough to go and look. And so he went, and the flies went with him. They knew the way. All their friends were there already.
The existence of the pool had saved the CCS a lot of time and effort. All they had to do was divert the little stream back to its original course and the pool drained dry in no time. When Paxton reached it, the hole was about half-full and four soldiers wearing rubber gloves and sterilised face-masks were carefully stacking bodies on top of the neat rows of bodies already in place. They were working carefully, not out of any sense of respect for the dead, but because it made best use of the space and the last thing they wanted was to have to dig another fucking great hole like this one.
Paxton watched them work. The stench of decay was just tolerable as long as he breathed through his mouth. The soldiers ignored him. The flies had a gala day.
He strolled around the hole and went across and took a look inside the tender. There was one body that he recognised at once, even though it was lying face-down. It was young and small, and the cords of the neck were undeveloped, like a boy’s. That body was unmistakable. He climbed inside and turned it over.
Wrong face. Wrong body.
He walked back to camp, trailing a few diehard flies behind him.
When the old man shuffled out of the lodge to open the gates, Paxton got out and told the driver he would walk up to the house. The day was cooler, and trees cast long shadows over the grass. The car drove on. Now that the old man was closer he could see that Paxton’s right sleeve was empty. He ducked his head and gave a shaky salute. “Merci, m’sieur,” Paxton said, seriously. They shook hands, Paxton using his left hand. The old man’s skin was as smooth and hard as a Sam Browne.
He had dozed in the car and now he felt fresh if not strong. The grounds were empty and very quiet. A heron took off from the lake and steered away from him, wings beating slow, and lost itself behind the island.
Someone had seen him: a maid was waiting at the door. She led him upstairs and along a corridor he hadn’t been along before. A door opened onto a balcony. The balcony overlooked the little ballroom. Ballet music was playing and down below Judy Kent Haffner, in a black leotard, was putting her elastic body through the same old astonishing routine.