Armistice

by Nick Stafford

  Feeling very much like the country mouse, she searched the impassive faces of those around her for the least unapproachable, to ask for help.

  A soldier in uniform ushered Philomena into Major James’ office.

  “He won’t keep you waiting long. Sit there, miss.”

  The room was plain and formal: a desk, a portrait of the king. It didn’t feel like anyone’s room in particular. He might not have been back here very long. The leather seat creaked as her weight shifted upon it.

  She looked down at her hands and found that they were moving slowly, like fronds in water; little ripples. She made no attempt to influence them, instead trying to remember all the potential questions she had for Major James. She told herself off for not having written them down and decided to try to do that now. Rifling through her everyday bag she found a stub of pencil and the sheaf of envelopes. On the back of one she began to scribble a question. She drew a line from it and scribbled a sub or supplementary question. Then more lines to additional queries. What began as an orderly list quickly became a diagram, as if a structure was being exposed, or she was inadvertently mapping the truth that there never was, nor could be, a single consequence of an action.

  She was hunched over engaged in this when Major James swiftly entered the room so she sat up straight a little too swiftly to be dignified. She noticed that he looked anxious in his body if not in his face, losing his stride a little—it wasn’t a trip, nor was it enough to be called a stumble, but there was a definite malfunction and correction. Caused by the abrupt way she had sat up?

  “Miss Bligh?” His smiling eyes looked practiced.

  “Yes,” replied Philomena, suddenly worried about military etiquette, gathering herself to stand.

  “Please, stay seated,” said the neatly uniformed major as he made his way to the other side of the desk and put down his cap. Then he looked as if he changed his mind, and came to the front of the desk, nearer his visitor, where he perched, working off his tight gloves, which he afterward held in one hand. He was stiff-backed. He sported a bushy mustache. In his early forties? His ears stuck out a little.

  “Thank you for seeing me without an appointment,” Philomena said, “and so early in the morning.”

  “It’s a pleasure to meet you,” he said, taking in the overnight bag on the floor by her feet. “Traveled far?”

  It was a new bag; paisley. When Philomena had bought it she’d worried it might have a bit too much pattern. Now, in that austere room it looked positively brash. If in the shop it had quietly burbled, in Major James’ office it screamed.

  “From Manchester.” She examined the word “pleasure,” turning it over in her mind’s eye. It jarred but she decided that the major wasn’t being haphazard or insensitive; it was just a word. As if he knew what she was thinking the major went on:

  “I’d rather not have to meet you in these circumstances, of course. It was especially poignant, your fiancé’s death.”

  He spoke with clipped consonants, long vowels; very Standard English.

  “Poignant because it was the last day?” she asked.

  “Yes,” replied the major.

  He’d entered the room possibly anxious and now Philomena could sense—from how he looked away, eyes flickering, that he was embarrassed or awkward in some way.

  “Yes,” she said, “the day of the Armistice, first post I had a letter from him, then last post next day the notification and letter from you.”

  She searched a while for the next thing to say. Major James frowned and she realized her hands were doing their moving thing. She asked them to stop and they dropped to her lap. It was as if her hands slipped her consciousness from time to time and had to be reminded that she was supposed to be in charge.

  “Daniel Case was a very good man,” said Major James.

  Philomena felt her pulse quicken. There was something about the major—it wasn’t that he was embarrassed or awkward; she felt that he was engaged in some sort of evasion, and decided to test him a little.

  “Dan was always a little wild,” she said.

  “Not incompatible with being good,” replied Major James without hesitation, and she could see that he meant it. Notwithstanding, her doubts about the major hardened into a suspicion that he was concealing something. Was she reading the major wrongly?

  Feeling a little flustered by her possibly misguided reaction she said: “It’s a shame that they had to fight on the last day,” then immediately thought that shame was altogether too mild a word. “It’s appalling that they couldn’t have all got together and agreed that as it was the last day they’d stop there and then, and make the day before the last day.”

  As she said this she feared she was being stupidly naive about how things happen on a battlefield, but the major gave no sign of passing judgment. He explained, as if she were his equal: “We had to keep going; to take ground if possible. Some thought that we shouldn’t stop until we were in Germany; give them a taste of their own medicine.”

  Philomena suddenly felt like crying again and didn’t want to in front of the officer, so to distract herself she stood up and made moves to go. Out of the corner of her eye she could see the major’s brow had furrowed and his mouth had dropped open.

  “Thank you for seeing me,” she said, making herself look him in the eye.

  Major James’ mouth closed, and Philomena thought that he looked a little relieved that the meeting was ending; she didn’t blame him. He certainly reached the door quickly enough.

  “I just wanted to see some of the men who knew him,” said Philomena.

  “Who else have you met?” asked Major James, lightly.

  “No one yet. You’re the first.” She took a few steps then remembered she hadn’t got one of the things she’d come for.

  “Actually, I wonder if you might be able to help me. I have one address but I need another. I have the names of two of Dan’s friends, but only the peacetime address for one of them. I have Captain, or, rather Mr. Jonathan Priest’s name and address.”

  Major James nodded stiffly. The way he was holding himself, she wondered if he was feeling quite well. Perhaps that was what she had been sensing. Or, she wondered if he had met many women since the end of the war, and if mostly, like her, they didn’t really want to know very much apart from that it had been quick, but they had a tendency to break down and cry, and that was awkward for him, and he’d feared she would be the same.

  “Would you be able to help me with an address for the other man?” she asked.

  “I shall do what I can,” replied Major James, returning to his desk, reaching for the card index. “What name is it?”

  “Captain, or Mr. Anthony Dore,” she said, noticing a slight twitch in Major James’ fingers just before they flicked through the index. Having found an entry he sat behind the desk to write.

  “Here,” he said, beginning to copy a few lines onto a piece of crisp white letter paper. His hand made a strange movement, a sort of spasm, and he changed his grip on his pen and wrote the next words awkwardly, almost illegibly, muttered to himself, shook his head and resumed his former grip on his pen.

  Everyone was a bit funny since the war started, weren’t they? Philomena knew that you couldn’t blame everything on it but neither could you ask: do you do that because of something in the war?

  In her room in the Holborn hotel, “The Daphne,” the wall-mounted gas lamp cast a shadow of itself on the heavy purple paper behind. In the muffled light she could see that the ceiling was once possibly painted off-white but now was off-yellow on the way to light brown, and that the counterpane on the bed was shiny with age. The room was cramped; she could reach from the end of the bed to touch the cold glass of the window. The faded rug curled at the edges. There was no sink. The wardrobe rocked when she opened the doors. The predominant odor was of mothballs and what could be old feet—old some part of the body—feet hopefully, feet rather than other noxious zones of unwashed bodies. And still the room wasn’t cheap. Lond
on was very, very expensive. Only one night, though.

  She put her paisley bag on the bed then from her everyday bag extracted the bundle of envelopes. She fanned through until she found the photograph of Dan pretending to smoke a stick as if it were a cigar and propped this upright against the paraffin lamp she hoped she wouldn’t have to use that stood on the bedside table.

  In her mind she could hear Dan declare that one day he would smoke a real cigar that size.

  She placed particular envelopes at the photograph’s foot, as if constructing a shrine. From another envelope she took a letter and read it again. It was from the man called Jonathan Priest. There was an address, his office address; legal chambers. In this letter he explained that he didn’t yet have a permanent home address—after being demobbed he couldn’t decide where to settle. It was a friendly letter, almost chatty, as if from someone she knew. A few minutes ago the hotel receptionist—Philomena didn’t know what else to call the slovenly man who provided the key to this room—had squinted at Jonathan Priest’s address and peered at her map, stabbed the location with his forefinger, leaving a grubby mark. “Fifteen to twenty minutes’ walk,” he’d barked, “if you don’t get lost, for it’s a proper labyrinth. If you do get lost, we’ll sell your belongings in a month to pay your bill.” He’d winked to show that, despite appearances, he wasn’t being unpleasant. “On your own?” he’d said. “Yes,” she’d replied. “Hmm,” he’d said.

  A rare shaft of sunlight slanted in through Philomena’s grubby window creating a narrow beam over the top of the bed. On an impulse she raised her hand and brought it down flat on the counterpane with a whump! She watched the dust motes thrown upward dance and twinkle in the sunlight, the glinting detritus of the room’s previous occupants. She recalled home, about how the light beams could be caught in the glass of the magnifiers and redirected to all corners of the workshop. It was the tip of the tail of the winter, still in the months when daylight was in short supply. When the days grew longer and the sun rose higher they worked all the hours they could in the bright natural light. Work. Home. Loneliness.

  The thought of work made her consciously straighten her spine. She was determined to avoid becoming hunched like the others. An occupational hazard, they all said. It could be avoided, she had decided; didn’t want Dan going off her because she was all bent over. There; she caught her thoughts. Dan wouldn’t be going off her, would he? How long would this forgetting take? She didn’t mean forgetting—I’ll never forget you—she meant how long would these ambushes continue? These aftershocks? It was the middle of March, and Dan had died on November 11. She’d begun to understand those photographs she’d seen of women in black; foreign-looking women, who stayed in mourning for the rest of their lives. How long would that be—the rest of her life? Future. Don’t think. Just live now. Or black dog in long dark lane. She felt sick, and unbalanced by lack of sleep.

  She lay down. She stared at the ceiling. She began to see patterns in the cracks in the thick paint and its patina when she didn’t want to see anything. She shut her eyes but still she could see; at first mostly blackness, with flashes of red and yellow, then, unbidden and unwelcome, images of war: men, bits of men, their insides on the outside, obscenely glistening, hands trying to push portions back inside mushy holes. She imagined groups of men, faceless. She was trying not to hear the sounds of war, the explosions, screams, whimpers. The smells: blood, feces, rottenness, stale breath, damp—no, wet—no, sodden wool, that’s overpowering—suffocating, in a confined space, like a dugout, or a grave. She opened her eyes and deliberately widened them and looked to the limit of her periphery, stretching and blinking, sucked in daylight in the hope of dislodging the war images. She sat up and poked her fingers into her ears and waggled them to create a rushing noise to drown out the war sounds, and she cupped her hands over her nose and mouth and inhaled the smell of her palms. There was the counterpane—the last thing she had touched.

  Having reset herself, she lay down again, picked a quiet spot on the ceiling and tried to concentrate on it, to block everything else out. She lay on her back and sent her gaze like a beam to the spot on the ceiling.

  CHAPTER TWO

  It was still not yet mid morning when, nearing the receptionist’s smudge on her map, Philomena crossed a busy commercial street and continued into a low brick passage, which opened out at the other end in to a surprising garden square. On her left ran an ancient, bulging brick wall. Past this there was an entrance, through which she could see another square of manicured lawns surrounded by grand buildings. Over the tops of them, turrets and spires. There were men passing swiftly, singly and in pairs, dressed in closely woven black cloaks and white wigs, carrying thick bundles of papers tied with wide ribbon. Expensive motor cars purred past, their black paintwork shiny as lacquer. Keep Off the Grass! a sign commanded. An elegant terraced row to the right showed a date, 1787, built into its brickwork. A mature purple wisteria ran several yards along it and a vast magnolia threatened to bloom, its buds standing ripe, upright, swollen, parted, revealing furled pink-tinged petals.

  A man in a black three-piece suit and bowler carrying a large bunch of keys crossed Philomena’s path. She expected him to challenge her, but he did not. She moved on, passing an ancient-looking cracked wooden door studded with black bolts. Beyond that there was what looked like a miniature barn. It had a roof, and columns, but no walls. The ceiling was decorated with stone carvings of foliage and fruit. A sign: “This chapel was reopened after being enlarged. April 8, 1883.” Another sign, by a door in a wall: Flat 1, Lord and Lady—. Flat 2, Lord and Lady—. Titled people lived here!

  Retracing her steps Philomena located a list of names in gilt transfer on a painted black background, but Jonathan Priest’s wasn’t among them. Another man, in a gray three-piece, left one door and entered another a few yards ahead (in a way that reminded her of the White Rabbit in Alice) and she pursued him. Entering the low door she called: “Excuse me, please,” as he was about to disappear around a corner.

  “Yes, miss,” he replied over his shoulder.

  “I am looking for this gentleman, please,” she said, showing her letter from Jonathan Priest.

  “Follow me, miss,” said the man, as he ducked back out of the low door they had just entered.

  He guided her to a full-sized door where Mr. Jonathan PRIEST appeared on another gilt list. Behind this door a sharp-nosed clerk looked at her letter and informed her that “sir” wouldn’t be back until late afternoon. He encouraged her to leave a note. She became anxious. What should she write? In her mind she tried “I am Philomena Bligh, Dan’s fiancée. I’ve come down to London on the off-chance of meeting Dan’s surviving friends.” She examined whether she really did want to meet them. If she had really wanted to meet them she would have made contact in advance and secured proper appointments, wouldn’t she? The clerk’s gentle cough brought her back and she quickly wrote her name and the name and address and telephone number of her hotel on a card the clerk provided. On her way out she learned, from an announcement on the wall, the court that Jonathan Priest was “performing in”—as the clerk put it—that morning.

  “Could I meet him there?” she asked. “Is he returning here at lunch?”

  “Do you know him at all?” asked the clerk, whose name was Jones.

  “No,” Philomena admitted.

  “You can watch him if you like,” suggested Jones.

  “Watch him?”

  “He’s due to be on his feet this morning, summing up. If you hurry you’ll catch him. I shall furnish you with a description, so’s you don’t get the wrong man by accident. He’s tall, he’s dark in color—his eyes and hair that is, which is wavy if you were able to see it under his wig—he’s medium build, his type is restless. And that should be enough to distinguish him from the other barristers who I happen to know are there in that court: one fat and gray, one bow-legged, and one short in the arms.” All this said flat, rapidly, but with a slight twinkle in his eye.


  Thus it was that Philomena found herself—after a short walk down to Fleet Street, and a turn east—seated in a public gallery at the Old Bailey, watching Jonathan Priest conducting a defense. He was tall as Jones had said, but also graceful, and not restless; animated to an abnormal degree. Not that he was waving his arms about—it was his energy that was extraordinary: the amount of it, its intensity, and the way he marshaled and channeled it. The whole focus of the wood-paneled courtroom was on him, the jurors’, particularly.

  Jonathan Priest stopped moving and pinched the bridge of his nose for a few moments and Philomena swore that he had all twelve of them holding their breath. He dropped his hand, sent his weight upward, balanced on his heels and turned his face upward, toward her. She slid back in her seat, leaning away from him, peeking down, but he was oblivious to her. His eyes didn’t take her in; they flickered from side to side, their movement and lack of focus revealing that he sought inspiration not from the surface of the material world but from somewhere inside himself.

  He turned back, his weight dropped down again and he was in full flow, voicing his thoughts. He could be an actor, a proper actor, who appeared in plays, and was paid for it. The people in Philomena’s hometown, Saddleworth, who got together and put on productions—none of them had his presence. He was compelling, but he had a tentativeness about him too, a hesitancy, a delicacy, even.