by Lia Mills
When he touched me, I had the strangest sense that he was making me flesh, making me real in the world again. Making the world real.
‘There’s something I have to ask you. Tell you. About Liam. Something he did.’
It was all in a letter, the last one before the terse, two-word message: No more. The one that told me he didn’t want to come back. The one that explained his long silence to Isabel, a silence I didn’t break for him, because it would have felt like a betrayal.
I’d told no one. Not Isabel, not Dad, not even Eva. I couldn’t hold it in any longer. It poured out of me.
All leave postponed, we went up the line again. Something was up. Transports rolled night and day, moving artillery, the horses struggling through muck. Then a bombardment. Hell on earth. Three days, it lasted. I was in a hole with three others, all dead. I’d lost my bearings. The earth out here’s been wrenched inside out – hills become pits, heaps of muck where there used to be trench. Bits of men strewn around and all landmarks blasted. There’s no knowing which direction to take for your own line, which would bring you to theirs. You could jump into a trench, thinking yourself safe, and land bang in the middle of a nest of Germans. I was parched, tongue rasping with thirst. Sporadic fire in the distance, the fight burning itself out. There were trees nearby. I crept in, for shelter and to take my bearings.
I leaned against a trunk for breath. When it steadied, I saw a field-grey uniform, not thirty yards away, and over it a ruddy farmboy’s face, staring at me. My pulse throbbed so hard in my ears, I thought they’d burst. Neither of us moved. His eyes wary and alert, as mine must’ve been. Blood on his chin. He held out his two hands. His rifle in one of them, held by the barrel, harmless as anything. No blade. He took a backward step. Away. Then another. We could let each other be, go our separate ways. All this was in his eyes. He turned his broad grey back to me. It came to me then that if I let him go he could use that rifle against anyone, any of the men, Doyle or Wilson, or the priest. That’s when I raised mine.
I thought I’d missed. He lurched, stopped still. I thought he’d spin around and shoot me in return. I wished he would. I’d have ripped my heart out and held it towards him for a target, if he had. I prayed for the shot that would end it all. Instead, he crumpled. Six feet of Imperial uniform. Folded up and fell.
I sat beside his body. Night crept in. Some men from my company found me, brought me back. I began this day a soldier and finished a murderer. I could be dead myself, for all I know. If so, I’m not writing this at all, but dreaming it. I can say what I like. Nothing will change.
The brother you thought you knew is gone. All the love in the world won’t bring him back. This is life, now. Hardly worth fighting for.
A pulse throbbed in Hubie’s neck. When I couldn’t stand his silence any longer, I said, ‘Well? What do you think?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Nothing? He killed a man who was no threat to him.’
‘And?’
‘And – I think he put himself in harm’s way because of it.’
‘Do you, now.’ He lit a cigarette. Didn’t offer me one.
‘I think it was himself he killed, when he fired that shot.’
‘Stop it!’ he roared, making me jump. His eyes bulged. His voice was a splintered thing, bouncing off the walls. ‘Stop!’
I kept my head down. After a while he said, hoarse but calmer, ‘Does it make you feel better, to think that?’
‘Of course not.’
‘Good, because it doesn’t make one damned bit of difference. How many men do you think he might have killed in, what, six months of fighting?’ The scorn he showed us all at first was back in his eyes; he was blind with it. ‘I’m sure he didn’t know. This one – yes, he could have let him go. But what he says is true. That same soldier could have gone on to kill me. Or Jonesy. Or a hundred others. Kill or be killed, is the logic of it. Liam’s loyalty was to his own, not to some peacetime code or other. He knew that.’
‘Then, why? Why would he stand up like that, with the flares lighting up the sky the way you say they were?’
‘A moment of madness? Maybe he wanted to pull down the sky and smother the whole filthy war. Choke it to death and bury it. Maybe he forgot, for a split second, where he was and what might happen. Maybe he thought luck was on his side. We’ll never know. Multiply that unknowing by a million. What does it change? Nothing.’ He took a long breath. ‘Whatever hellish frame of mind he was in, it’s over. If he brought it down on himself, at least he took no one with him.’
I left the window, the dark grass and knotted trees, the canal, the sentries. Slipped into bed beside him, as naturally as though I’d been doing it all my life.
Until now, I’d barely been aware of my body, other than as a shell to carry me around, needing minimal care and attention to keep it fed and clean. Now it was wide awake. It rushed forward, pushed past me in this strange matter of love, of loving him – what else could I call it?
‘Something bigger is dying out there,’ he said into the floating, half-sleeping dark. ‘And we’ll never know what it was.’
‘I thought you were asleep.’
He raised himself to sitting, propped by pillows, struck a match. His features swam towards me and away. The sweet smell of a fresh cigarette. I wondered what time it was. Hard to judge, in those dim hours, half-night, half-morning. Somewhere a bird sang, a sweet triumphant note that settled it. Another day. What would it bring? We fastened the wooden shutters across the gaping, unglazed window-frame and we were back in our own black cave, the rage of the fires shut out.
My parents could have been among the refugees, about to lose everything to fire. It’s true they planned to move, but that would have been a matter of packing what they wanted to save, books and photographs and letters, long discussions and sessions of do-you-remember-this? Fire would destroy it all. Every trace of Liam. Eva as a child, before she challenged them. Matt, the petted baby of the house.
‘That world has gone,’ Hubie said. ‘Have you not listened to anything I said?’
He slid his thumb along the underskin of my forearm. ‘Once I could have circled your waist with my two hands.’ He held me by the wrist instead, loose as a bracelet. ‘Come away with me, Katie. Let’s leave this godforsaken place and not look back. We’ll go somewhere new.’
‘Where?’
‘I’ve been thinking about Canada.’
A sun rose through the word. A place of light and snow, long hard winters. ‘Why there?’
‘There’s room there – and to spare – for anyone who’s willing to work.’
‘It’s so far away.’ I looked at the shape our hands made, braided, on the sheet. ‘Liam was never there.’
‘Has it occurred to you that Liam might not be haunting you, that it’s the other way around?’
Everything stilled. This was the heart of it. One way or another, there was the rest of my life to face. Keeping pace with me in that queer way I was getting used to, he asked, ‘What do you want, Katie?’
Again I couldn’t answer his question. ‘What will you do?’
‘There’s a whole new world out there, waiting to be built. I can’t do the building, but I know about planning, and moving men and equipment, and materials. I have ideas, designs, in here’ – he tapped his forehead – ‘for machinery to make the work faster and safer. I can’t make them myself but I’ll find people who can. I’ll find someone to back me. They were fine men, the Canadians. Clean, brave fighters and practical. I could get on in a place that breeds men like that. If it doesn’t work, I’ll try something else.’
‘I wish I was like you, ready for anything.’
‘What are you waiting for, permission? You won’t get it. Believe me, our society has more murderous concerns than deciding whether or not to let a young lady take a job in a shop.’
‘Don’t mock.’ I groaned and buried my face in his shoulder. ‘When you say it – you make everything seem easy. As if nothing matters but wh
at you want.’
‘It would be a good time for a person to disappear,’ he said.
‘Don’t.’ I was thinking of Matt. How his departure would make mine more difficult. But, if I stayed, I’d have to pretend that none of this had happened. I’d have to unlearn all I’d learned. And Eva. What lay ahead for her, what might she need from me?
Hubie stroked my arm, quite roughly at first, but then he slowed, his touch lighter, questioning. ‘I forget where I am sometimes. Have I ruined you?’
I laughed. Then I stopped laughing.
He patted my shoulder, alarmed. ‘There,’ he said. ‘There.’ Threads of flame in his eyes. His missing, ghostly fingers quickened on my skin.
He’d got it wrong. He thought I was crying for lost innocence, or virtue, words without colour, muscle or sinew. Words that would never bleed. I was crying because there could be no more pretence. The people who had died were dead. Every morning that I woke, I could get up or not, eat or not, admire the day or not, and it would still be true. Liam would never come home. There are things that can never be undone, thresholds to be crossed in one direction only.
Friday, 28 April 1916
I dreamed I was an island, a stony beach. The sea rose and showed itself, then sank back, sighing. It pushed at the shingle, the land a wheel it wanted to turn. It sucked the shore, shrugged and turned away, biding its time.
In that grey moment before day begins, when light is still a veil you could part with your hands and pass through, I woke, tasting salt. The air was autumnal, heavy with bonfires. But there’d been no summer yet. A stair creaked and I was wide awake, rigid with fear. Someone creeping in? No, the house settled.
There was no one there, but soon enough, too soon, there would be. I moved closer to Hubie, laid my body against his. He stirred. I closed my eyes and let my body do the seeing, felt his skin bloom and come alive against mine. ‘If there was no light, ever again,’ I said, ‘would time stop?’
He rolled over. ‘We wouldn’t know what time was.’
I moved under the sheet so that we were length to length. I wanted the cup of his shoulder to fit my palm like a warm egg. The fan of his ribs, the taut button of nipple springing to my mouth, the feel of his hair when I spread it the wrong way with my fingers.
I couldn’t imagine returning to a life without these strange, delirious nights, or quite believe that other people lived them too. How does no one blush when they use their hands to prepare food, write letters, open doors? How do they hide their wild undernature, their inventive nocturnal selves, put on their clothes and go out about their business?
Liam wrote that he started each day wondering if he’d see its end. Our days lie ahead of us, already formed, waiting for us to do their living for them. Our lives live us, I think, rather than the other way around. War is the life that has chosen me. It was always waiting for me to step into it, like a pair of new boots, tight fitting. Or a skin. Once you put it on, you’ll never get it off.
This was a different kind of choosing, a new learning, savouring the mysteries of something as everyday as skin, its changing textures and appetites, its conflicted nature bringing us together and holding us apart at one and the same time.
After a while I got up and opened the shutters. I wanted to see Hubie’s face. Outside, the morning was greasy and dense, yet I could see blue in it, as through a thick veil. There was a sour black smell.
‘The fires must still be burning,’ he said. ‘Come back to bed.’
A person could lose herself in the flaring petals of his irises, intricate layers of jewelled colour, every shade of green and gold and brown, the dark well of his pupils.
‘Say you’ll come away with me, when this is over. If you stay, you’ll squander your life on what other people want from you.’
‘And if I go? Wouldn’t I be giving it to you?’
‘I’d hope not.’ He gathered my hair and rolled it around his hand, like a bandage, held it at the back of my head so I had to face him. ‘We could have a life of our very own making. Think of it, Katie. A place where people make special shoes and walk out on fresh snow. Where you can pace out a stretch of land and call it yours, so long as you’re willing to work it.’
He was a stranger.
He was another self.
He was so close. It wasn’t close enough. Every hollow in me ached for him to fill it.
He saw and said things other people never would.
It could be a life’s work, learning to see what’s right in front of you. You’d need companions who took you seriously.
On the windowsill, Paschal hopped up and down and pointed. He jumped to the bed and back again, chattering.
I went to see. Through the murky light, two figures holding hands moved slowly under a sky like a bruise, like spirits crossing from one world to the next through fire. A child skipped along beside them, her hands free, in the pattern of a hopscotch. Two feet, one foot, two feet. Hop, hop, hop.
My heart kicked. ‘It’s Dote and May – and Tishy. They’ve come back.’ A stab of loss, then panic: we’d be discovered.
Someone stepped out from under a tree, one of the neighbours. Dote and May stopped to talk. Tishy went to the edge of the canal and threw something into the water.
I hurried into my skirt and blouse, dragged a brush through my hair at the mirror. Hubie stood behind me. ‘You look fine.’ Our reflected eyes met. I couldn’t prevent my mouth from curving into a smile that lifted my chin and squared my shoulders so that I stood taller. Looking at him gave me such satisfaction. If time pinned this exact moment, fixed it like a moth to a frame, our privacy unbroken, I’d be left leaning into him forever, my spine dissolving, his face looking at mine, taking me in, the two of us wide open to each other. It was enough.
No, it would never be enough; it was only a beginning. Already, satisfaction turned towards wanting. ‘Don’t look at me like that when they come in. They’ll know.’
He kissed the top of my head. ‘Think about what I said. We’ll talk, later.’
I splashed myself with Dote’s cologne and followed him downstairs. We heard the gate, the sound of feet crunching broken glass. They’d have news we might not want to hear. War was the same story told over and over, only the names would change. I wondered was love like that. I’d never know if I walked away from it.
Hubie opened the door and went down the steps. I disliked the sight of his back moving away from me. How could I let him go? Beyond him, across the road, the canal was full, full as I felt, brimming and ready to spill. The air smouldered, hard to breathe. Chunks of charred matter and singed paper a black snow falling. So many disembodied words flying free, they made my head swim. I plucked a tattered scrap from the air. It turned to dust and soot in my palm. Imagine manuscripts, like Dote’s, all the years of work and thought and dedication lost. Imagine all the proofs of your existence gone – who you were, everything you’d ever done, or planned to do. Everything lost, everything starting again.
A breeze sounded in my ear, choose. Somewhere, someone wept, as well someone should. I wished for rain, to wash away the smoke and murderous grime of the coming day. Going down the steps after him, I breasted the smutty fog as swans breast water. There was the full span of my foot, there my weight and there the solid ground.
Author’s Note
This is a work of fiction, and its main characters and their predicaments are wholly imagined. But it is set in a very particular time and place, against the backdrop of two great conflicts, and I have relied on many sources, published and unpublished, to help me depict its settings and atmospheres. Vera Brittain’s books are an essential resource for anyone interested in the Great War, and in particular its effect on soldiers’ families. Letters from a Lost Generation was invaluable to me in trying to think my way into the mindset of a soldier. The scene in which the Crilly family receives Liam’s personal effects has its origins in Brittain’s account of Roland Leighton’s effects, although she is far more eloquent and expository than
I am. Other sources on the Great War that I have found useful include Myles Dungan’s Irish Voices from the Great War, Correlli Barnett’s The Great War, Robert Graves’s Goodbye to All That and The Ways of War by Tom Kettle and Mary Sheehy Kettle. The exemplary firstworldwar.com was invaluable.
James Stephens’s The Insurrection in Dublin is a contemporaneous account of the Easter Rising by an eyewitness; other first-hand accounts are contained in Roger McHugh’s Dublin 1916 and Alfred Fannin’s Letters from Dublin, Easter 1916, among others. Max Caulfield’s The Easter Rebellion remains one of the most vivid fact-based accounts, while Charles Townshend’s more recent Easter 1916: The Irish Rebellion is authoritative and comprehensive.
Sean J. Murphy’s article ‘The Gardiner Family, Dublin, and Mountjoy, County Tyrone’, available on his website, provided the basis for the lecture Katie and Bill attend in the Mansion House.
Two evocative books that helped me to think about Dublin’s atmospheres during this period are Dublin 1911, edited by Catriona Crowe, and Christiaan Corlett’s Darkest Dublin.
Acknowledgements
Anne Enright saved this novel from the shredder not once but twice. Blame her. A residency at the Centre Culturel Irlandais in Paris turned it inside out and lit it from the inside. Huge thanks to everyone there, especially Sheila Pratschke; and to Gail Ritchie, fellow resident, with whom I shared many adventures in Paris graveyards and late-night conversations about dead soldiers and history’s many forms of amnesia. A bursary from the Arts Council/An Chomhairle Ealaíon arrived at a crucial moment: many thanks to them.
Thanks to members of writing groups past and present for their patient encouragement, and to the loyal readers of early drafts: Sheila Barret, Celia de Fréine, Catherine Dunne, Simon and Vanessa Robinson. Also to participants at the ‘Women, War and Letters’ conference in the University of Limerick in 2012, and in particular its organizers, Tina O’Toole and Meg Harper. Anna South gave generous and practical advice when I needed it.