After Z-Hour

by Elizabeth Knox

  And Emma, you don’t need to submit to being lonely. Invite Edith up to stay. After all, you know how she feels about Gordon MacVey, and proximity is everything I’m told.

  I will send you a more interesting letter after my leave. This one I’ll post in London. Did you get the Magazine? Did you like Alan’s and my literary efforts? Critical comment please—though not too critical.

  Stay cheerful,

  Your affectionate brother,

  Mark

  P.S. I have started to attend services again. What would Mother say if she knew?

  There were nearly tears, but no tears; there was the flood of conversation, catching up, Alan’s aunt’s voice shedding its reserve and scaling heights of reminiscence about ‘Dear Lily’ at her house in the Garden City.

  Alan’s mother had painted and sent her sister a watercolour of her flower-filled garden and her two sons on the lawn, blue shadows on their fair hair and the baby’s white smock. It was hung up over the mantelpiece of the Chelsea house.

  Alan’s uncle came home from the bank, took off his hat and solemnly shook hands with his wife’s nephew and her nephew’s ‘mate’. (Alan said, ‘This is my mate, Mark,’ and the Uncle blinked and turned to me in ponderous bafflement, proffering his hand.)

  ‘Do you have relatives here?’

  (Aunt Eva was saying to Alan, ‘You must send your mother all the news from home—’)

  ‘No, I’m afraid not, my mother’s family were Irish, and my father was born in New Zealand.’

  ‘That must be unusual.’

  ‘Grandfather went over to run a government sheep station in 1849.’

  ‘Goodness, you’re an authentic colonial then?’ He offered me some tobacco. ‘Do you smoke a pipe?’

  ‘No, thank you.’

  The aunt scowled at her husband. Unperturbed he went on tamping tobacco into the bowl of his pipe. ‘Did you meet my nephew in the army?’

  ‘Yes, at the training camp back home. He came along and made me think he was doing me a favour giving me the cot near the door of the tent.’

  Alan heard this and laughed. ‘I learned that trick in Boys’ Brigade.’

  I shrugged. ‘Boys’ Brigade—he could have been an officer if he hadn’t enlisted underage.’

  The aunt’s face creased anxiously. ‘Oh Alan! You should have waited. Your poor mother, especially after Gilbert.’

  ‘I enlisted because of Gilbert, Aunt,’ Alan said coolly, then recovered. ‘Our platoon commander was at school with him—he was on the Peninsula too.’

  ‘He’s a New Zealander?’

  ‘Almost all our officers are New Zealanders—’ Alan refrained from adding ‘thank God’. ‘Lieutenant Given and our Captain are both Anzacs.’

  ‘The Lieutenant favours Alan—’ I teased.

  ‘We’re organising a cricket match at camp.’

  ‘Given’s a damn good bowler,’ I said, before Alan could, and noticed the aunt’s face stiffen at my mild expletive.

  ‘Mark rags me about cricket. He didn’t go to school, so he has no interest in team sports.’

  ‘No schooling?’ The uncle peered at me from under his grey brows.

  ‘My mother gave lessons to my sister and me, and to some of the stockmen’s children. I was going to attend Nelson College, but my father died. I envy Alan, the friends, the fun, the libraries—all that.’

  The uncle touched my sleeve. ‘Do you fancy a stroll in the garden?’

  I nodded.

  ‘Alan, I’m borrowing your friend to keep me company while I smoke my pipe.’

  We went out the front door and around the side of the house, through blooming rose bushes, all reds, pinks and mauves. In the garden an elderly nurse was seated on a white-painted ironwork chair under a sycamore, watching the family’s youngest child, a girl of five or six, playing near a large fishpond.

  The uncle lit his pipe, drawing vigorously. We stood, saying little, listening to the birds. Then his wife came to a window and called him in. I went over to the fishpond. Large, broad-backed goldfish with bulging eyes and a filmy drapery of fins and tails rose up under the weeds, lustrous, mouthing wonder.

  The child said, ‘Good afternoon.’ She was kneeling on a flagstone, agitating the water with a twig. ‘I saw you come up the path,’ she announced. ‘Are you my cousin?’

  ‘No. I’m his friend, Mark.’

  ‘I’m Kitty. You were wearing funny hats.’

  ‘Slouch hats.’

  ‘Have you come to tea? I’ve had my tea.’

  ‘We are going to a concert with your sister when she comes home.’

  ‘She works in a hospital. My brother’s in hospital. He’s wounded, in balloon.’

  ‘Did he fly a balloon?’

  She studied me as though I was an imbecile. ‘He’s in hospital in balloon,’ she reiterated.

  ‘Boulogne.’

  She dropped the twig and stood. Her wet hands left greenish blotches on her starched white pinafore. ‘Your voice is funny, like the post boy’s.’

  ‘It’s my accent. Your cousin and I are New Zealanders.’

  ‘Aunt Lily’s in New Zealand. She sent me a shawl.’

  ‘Mark!’ Alan came striding through the garden, the leaf lights pouring over his face and his eyes clearing from hazel to green ringed with black. He swept up the child. ‘Hello Kitty, old girl! I’m your cousin, Alan Thomas,’ sounding self-important, gracious and affectionate all at once. ‘Thornton, don’t tell me you’re shy of children too?’

  The girl put her hand up to her mouth and leant her head against his—her face: pink, happy, flattered; and his: quick, dark and mocking, presenting a picture that paint or film would fail to record.

  ‘Kitty and I were having a conversation.’

  ‘Well, Cousin Emily’s here, so you can come in and manage a conversation with her as the next step in your conquest of the female sex.’

  Kitty was clinging to his neck now and rejoicing. ‘You’re bigger than my brother!’

  ‘Everything is bigger in New Zealand, the sheep are as big as cows, and the cows as big as horses—’ he began, as he walked away with her.

  Emily had changed her uniform and smoothed her hair. She welcomed me, her voice educated and genteel and her hands red and roughened by lysol, hot water and hard work.

  Dinner was soup, salad, and fish poached in cream and white wine. Nothing out of the ordinary for Alan—but the sliced, raw vegetables were extraordinary and slightly alarming to me.

  Kitty used our departure to the concert as an excuse to come down and hang all over Alan, while pretending to inspect her sister’s outfit. We finally got away from the house and rode on top of an omnibus through a warm, humming London evening.

  A fine meal, a child, a cathedral, a cantata, all in one day. The tide began to ebb at Victoria Station the following morning. There, we were just another couple of lonely colonials with no one to see us off, no one who cared enough to brave the crowds, clamour and grief.

  I didn’t speak at any length to another child for years, not until the day before I climbed the highest peak on the Hill.

  I had just finished reading a letter from Andy, which said that John Palmer, setting off on holiday, travelling by ferry, had been startled by the loud blast of the ship’s whistle. Andy wrote, ‘It sent him off again.’ And I imagined John crouched, clutching the rail and shaking his head at concerned fellow passengers—like the shell-shocked soldier beneath the birches on the way to the Casualty Clearing Station.

  Then Beth Harper disturbed my thoughts by placing a book in my hands. ‘Mr Thornton, Emma says you’ll read it to me.’

  Along the other end of the veranda Emma was standing by the table, turning the teapot and eyeing her invalid brother. Joe and Maggie Harper, Gordon and Edie MacVey were talking amiably, while Jack Harper, Joe’s youngest brother, two years my junior and a whaler at the Tory Channel Station, stared at my sister’s profile, his gaze open, intent and easily interpreted.

  ‘Will you?�
� Beth asked.

  ‘If you don’t mind my whispery voice.’

  ‘No, I don’t mind.’

  ‘This book hasn’t any pictures.’

  ‘I don’t like pictures, they never make people look like it says they do. And all the princesses have gold hair, and all the witches have black hair.’ Her own hair was dark.

  ‘I see, but wouldn’t you rather be a witch and do magic?’

  ‘No, they get made to do horrible things like dance to their death in hot iron shoes!’

  ‘I remember. That’s “The Little Goose-girl”, isn’t it?’

  She looked surprised. ‘Yes.’ Then she opened the book at the first page and waited for me to begin.

  ‘“The land of the Blue Flower was not called by that name until—”’

  ‘Young King Amor was raised by a wise man in a mountain paradise, then sent down to heal his nation. “When you go down the mountain you will see things which are not beautiful, and those which are unclean …”

  ‘The tall young king stood holding his lantern above his head and gazing at the madman with deep thought in his eyes. “There is no time for hatred in the world,” he said. “There is no time.” “But the earth is full of magic,” Amor said to the Ancient One> “Most men know nothing of it, and so come to misery. The first law of the earth’s magic is this one. If you fill your mind with a beautiful thought—”’

  —Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme—

  ‘“—there will be no room for an ugly one.”’

  Beth retrieved the book. ‘Thank you, Mr Thornton.’ She thought for a while. ‘Do you think it is better living up high on the Hill—like the Ancient One’s castle on the mountain crag?’

  ‘Do you mean healthier?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I haven’t been down the hill yet.’

  ‘I’ve had enough downhill to last me a lifetime. I’d like to get higher up—maybe tomorrow I’ll climb the peak.’

  ‘Flint Peak, Daddy calls it.’

  ‘The outcrops look like flint, but they aren’t, they’re marble.’

  ‘I’ve been up there—you can see down both sides at once, for miles and miles. What’s flint?’

  ‘A hard, grey, flaky silica rock. They have a lot of it in England and France.’

  ‘Were you in the trenches in France?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What was it like?’

  ‘Bad—’

  She cocked her head and studied me mournfully.

  I laughed.’ But since I was there with friends, it was all right.’

  That evening with Alan in the Cathedral, the oldest building either of us had ever been into, I was introduced to the music of Bach. The chorus opening and marching away, making a broad causeway through time and space, through the many moments where ice cracks and buds break, to the moment when, traditionally, the ‘dwellers in dust’ awake. I sat back, cold and sweating beneath my shirt, licking my lips.

  When the soprano was singing Alan gripped my arm and pointed. The Lieutenant was a music lover too. That dreamy, withdrawn look, still unfamiliar, seemed appropriate then, as it never did later.

  There was an old woman beside him in the gallery, her hand closed over his on the stone rail.

  ‘She looks like a duchess,’ Alan said. Straight-backed, stately, her hair piled in a crown of stiff curls, wearing a gown of maroon lace and a pearl choker.

  She noticed the two soldiers gawking at her. Her deeply recessed, hooded eyes turned our way. And I thought of brown and black wings erupting from tussock, from the carcass of a rabbit, eyes a clean brown-gold and radiant with anger.

  And I remember how, during the ten minutes rest after fifty minutes’ march, on our way up to Switch Line in late summer 1916, after each section had stacked its rifles in cones and collapsed on the roadside, Alan jumped up on a stone wall, his legs planted wide, to survey the land: ‘Those hills are the chorus of Wachet auf.’ Gold grass foaming, fields rising and falling, poppies, cornflowers and veins of cool woodland.

  Another time, during winter on the Lys, we came back from a working party, wet through, to our billet in a barn; its bare wood icy, the roofs of all the farm buildings thatched in snow, the hedges and roads black, the orchard brittle and rimed white. Alan opened the barn door and the fog of his breath thinned perceptibly. Inside: hearth light, hurricane lamps and braziers made of Benzine tins and fired by whale oil. As Alan unwrapped he whistled the principal melody of the chorale: ‘Zion hears the watchmen singing—’

  I have all but forgotten those woven tunes: the sound of the years getting up out of the dust, the mud, out of a storm of ice and ashes—and dancing. A sound like the words I found in a book stowed in the threepenny bin at a shop on Charing Cross Road: Truly I have gone my way through a hundred souls and through a hundred cradles and birth pangs. I have taken many departures, I know the heart-breaking last hours. A sound that could make hard praying hands form in my chest and stomach—Wachet auf, ruft uns die stimme—cornflowers and poppies and a cuckoo calling unseen in the woods behind the line on the Somme. Goldfish in their shining veils of flesh, drifting up out of green darkness. Or age-spotted hands folded serenely on a white apron. Or, behind a fan encrusted with jet, powdered skin, pursed lips and gold hawk eyes. Or Alan surging through the shoals of sunlight, through the sharp scent of pinks and the ashy tang of cineraria, in a summer garden.

  Alan, whom I’d promised, once we were home, to climb with up the highest peak on the Hill.

  Lys, even after Goose Alley, was just the beginning; five months before Messines, eight before Bellevue, eleven before Oatlands. Twenty-seven months until I climbed the peak alone.

  Kelfie

  They had departed, quietly and hurriedly packing their belongings and leaving by the forced window; Ellen and Jill walking off with their arms about each other’s waists, Hannah carrying all their gear and Basil—bringing up the rear—pausing a moment at the door and looking back at me, his face smudged and pale in the weak light.

  The fire made a ribbons-in-wind sound as cold air pushed down the flue. I took the last piece of wood from the fire box and put it into the flames, then sat back, hugging my knees.

  Wrathall came back into the room, and when I looked up at him, said, ‘You didn’t expect me to go with them? I would hardly have done that.’ He sat beside me and began absently brushing his fingers back and forth through the chips of bark on the bald carpet. ‘I can’t think what came over me,’ he said softly.

  I stared at his hand and it became still. He said, ‘You look strange—extinguished.’

  The house enfolded me, patient, mute, abiding.

  ‘Perhaps now you’ll tell me how you knew about Vic’s body.’

  ‘I didn’t know.’

  ‘I heard you through the jammed door, you said I’d gone off to bury the body. Not even “a body”, but “the body”.’

  ‘I don’t remember.’

  ‘You mightn’t remember saying it, but you must remember knowing about it.’

  I looked at him. ‘How can I remember knowing what I know now?’

  ‘Why did you follow me out of the house? Why did you offer to help me?’

  ‘No particular reason.’

  ‘Aren’t you even going to ask why I did it?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘But you involved yourself.’

  ‘If I let you tell me about it, it’ll just seem worse. I shouldn’t have helped you, it was a crazy thing to do. I believe there is such a thing as justified killing, but I can’t pretend I decided your murder was justified. You probably killed him because you lost your temper—that terrible temper I’ve glimpsed twice now.’

  ‘OK. You helped me conceal an unjustified killing, so what does that make you?’

  ‘Legally, an accessory after the fact. Crazy anyway.’ I hugged my knees tighter and stared at the fire. ‘Perhaps I did it because I was impressed by the fact that I was only able to find a way out of the house after it was discovered you were gone, and when I wa
s on my own. As if I was being invited to follow you and find you out. But I didn’t expect you to have a body in the boot of your car, and perhaps, because it threw me, I offered to help you as a way of taking control of the situation. Exorcising my shock. Not appearing at a disadvantage. Also, practically, you would have seen me if I’d tried to run, and maybe you could’ve stopped me getting back to the house and telling the others. Anyway, I just didn’t want to feel out of control, I had to act to accommodate the whole thing.’ I took a deep breath. ‘Or perhaps I did it to really put myself beyond the pale. To cross over into a lawless place. Maybe, to me, that shape wrapped in black plastic was a dark beacon burning before me in a wilderness of light. I’ve never been able to step into the screen and partake of the murderer’s singularity. I’ve never tried to alter the poison I’ve watched while munching Jaffas at the movies, blinkered by EXIT signs, always showing me a way out of the darkness.’

  He laughed (tension, fury, confusion). ‘You just gave me several possible explanations for your behaviour as a way of taking control of the situation again. Of everything you’ve just said, that’s the only thing I find believable.’

  ‘All you should be interested in is whether or not I’m going to keep your secret. I will keep it. If you want to confess, to explain, do it to someone else.’ I leaned towards him and my shadow settled, violet-tinged black, over his face. He looked thwarted, unhappy and ill. ‘What can your explanation be but the brick in that joke disguised as two jokes—the one where, in the first part, a guy builds a house, and has bricks left over and, after asking for suggestions about what to do with them builds a garage, and then a barbecue, till he has one brick left, which someone suggests he throw up in the air. So he throws it up in the air. That’s the punchline. And everyone goes, “That’s not funny.” In the second part of the joke—which it’s best to tell much later on in the joke-swapping session—a man and woman are on a plane and he has a cigar and she has a poodle, and he hates poodles and she hates cigars so they agree to throw both out of a plane. The joke ends: “And when the plane lands there’s the little poodle huddled on one of the wings, and what do you think it has in its mouth?” And of course the answer is: “The brick.”