“Of course not,” replied Jonathan. “I’ll wait out here, shall I?”
Philomena opened the door a crack so she could see his face.
“Is it about the sense and the feelings and the fuss?”
Jonathan looked blank for a moment, before: “Yes! Yes, that’s exactly what I’m here about.”
“Wait there,” she said, and shut the door. Immediately she opened it again: “Where are we going?”
“To another cafe,” said Jonathan. “Where we can talk. I can tell you a story.”
“Okay,” she said, and shut the door. She snatched it open again.’ “You won’t run off while I dress, will you?” she demanded.
Jonathan shook his head.
With her door closed she hurried into clean underwear, followed by the previous day’s outfit, topped by her hat, rammed down to cover the unkempt state of her hair.
While Jonathan queued for mugs of tea Philomena looked around the cafe, thinking that that day had been the second strangest of her life, after the day following the Armistice when, as Dan’s declared next of kin, hungover from the celebrations, she had learned of his death. There were all sorts of men seated at the tables. Some wealthy by the look of them, some drunk, one asleep. The majority were manual workers, filling up before work or on their way home. No other women, bar those behind the counter, until the arrival of a mixed party of night owls, slightly the worse for wear. The women didn’t wear wedding bands, and they smoked cigarettes.
Jonathan seemed much calmer now. He hadn’t wanted to start his story on the way here so Philomena knew no more than before. She had had, then put aside, an idea that whatever Jonathan was about to tell her might involve something Dan may have done—something wrong; bad, even. She momentarily feared that everyone had been concealing from her a misdeed of his, protecting her. Perhaps it would be better not to know. Jonathan arrived with the teas. Thick, brown stuff in tin mugs. He sat opposite her.
“Okay,” he said.
She noticed that despite the appearance of equilibrium, his hands shook.
“Okay. I’ll start with when I met him. When I met Dan. It’s material, in a way. It helps to explain why I think what I think happened, happened.”
“Okay. I understand,” said Philomena, nodding, not understanding, but humoring him. She just wished he would stop procrastinating.
“I met Dan six weeks before the end of the war, during a skirmish. A bit more than a skirmish, really. We’d been out on a recce when they started lobbing stuff at us, quite big stuff. I got separated and a bunch of them decided to do for me. So I jumped into this crater, well, I fell in, if truth be told. Running along, tripped over, found myself at the bottom of this pit.”
Philomena noticed that Jonathan’s working voice was almost gone. He was speaking in his native accent.
“So they see what’s happened and start fanning out around the rim and I’m firing up at them—got one or two—but I didn’t see another one of them taking a bead on me because the first thing I know is that something’s hit me on the head and I’m down and I can’t move. I think what Jerry did was to stand still and aim at me. He just stood still and I didn’t see him. Anyway, I opened my eyes to see if I was dead. I could hear movement but I couldn’t move myself. Jerry who’d stood stock still and shot me had come down to the bottom of the pit—I don’t know why, it was his mistake, don’t know what he was thinking of; he shouldn’t have been thinking at all. I could feel a bit of movement returning to my limbs and I could feel that my pistol was still in my hand so I thought if Jerry hangs about a bit more I might be able to finish him before he finishes me. He guessed what was up and raised his rifle and I was looking right down the barrel and I heard a shot and thought that I really must be dead now but no, Jerry had himself been shot by one of our blokes who had run down the pit, across it, and was now running up the other side. He hadn’t seen me at all so when I yelled ‘Hey!’ he swung around and was ready to shoot me but he saw my uniform and I hoisted my hands up to surrender just in case and screamed ‘I’m alive!’ and he said ‘just.’ And already we knew certain things about each other. Neither of us was posh, we had northern accents, we were both officers. Later we learned that both having been promoted ‘in’t field,’ the only difference between us was that I’d elected to enlist as a private whereas he’d had no choice. But, you know, we recognized kindred spirits, I suppose. He was Dan, of course.”
Philomena nodded eagerly, unexpectedly filled with a strange rapture.
“I had quite a lot of blood coming down from where Jerry’s bullet had creased me. It was going in my eyes and I was having to wipe it away but I managed to see another Jerry taking a bead on Dan’s back. He was almost lined up behind Dan but I could just see him at the edge, if you get the picture. I thought to shout but it wouldn’t have been quick enough—Dan would have had to turn—so I just took a chance and shot. Dan went down, and the other bloke, and I thought hell, I’ve shot them both, but Dan was all right, just a bit disgruntled because my bullet had passed through his trousers and just missed his, you know—”
Philomena felt herself redden.
“I told him that I hadn’t meant to do that—I was aiming for the edge of him, not there, between his … He swore a lot, didn’t he?”
She smiled and nodded, afraid to speak in case she distracted Jonathan.
“Anyway, they started lobbing more stuff our way so Dan joined me at the bottom of the crater and we got to know each other a bit better.”
Philomena’s eyes started to fill up. She could see Dan and Jonathan together in the hole—could see it as if she were there—imagined exactly how Dan and Jonathan would have been together.
Jonathan paused a second. “I can see that you’re crying, Philomena, but I’m just going to plow on,” he said.
“This isn’t really crying,” she muttered, taking out one of the cotton handkerchiefs she’d recently taken to carrying in duplicate at all times.
“Dan claimed that I’d ruined his best trousers and my reply was that there was a Chinese laundry around the corner—he could drop them in and pick them up before work; I’d pay. Then he wanted to know, because I was a captain whereas he was a second lieutenant, where we were or where we were supposed to be. I admitted that for some time I hadn’t had a fucking clue—excuse my French—a far from ideal situation, and he asked if I could see anything at all, through all the blood, and he reached out and wiped it from my forehead, like I was a child, and he was very, very concerned about me. He could break your heart, couldn’t he?”
Philomena couldn’t speak. She felt full of liquid, full of tears, and she was afraid that if she started crying properly she wouldn’t be able to stop. She’d become a puddle on the floor, run off into the ground.
“Anyway, shells were landing pretty close and getting closer. One threw a skull into our pit. It landed next to our heads. We saw it when we raised our faces from the earth. There were always bits of buried bodies being relocated by explosions. God knows how many times some people were interred. You could be buried on your side, blown up again, buried on the other side, ad infinitum.”
“Dan wrote to me about that skull,” Philomena interrupted.
“What did he say?” asked Jonathan.
“He said you looked at it and asked if it had a message for anyone back home. He thought that was funny.”
Jonathan swallowed hard. Philomena feared for a moment that she’d thrown him off course. But he swallowed hard again and picked up the thread of his story.
“We rummaged around the recent bodies in the pit and came up with a few usable bullets and loaded them into spare magazines. Dan told me the plan. ‘Right sir,’ ‘Yes, sir.’ ‘This is the plan, sir,’ he said. ‘Plan?’ ‘Yes, sir. Climb out of shell hole, crouch down, run like fuck, firing wildly.’ ‘Textbook, an excellent plan! I’ll try not to shoot you if you promise to try not to shoot me.’ And Dan said, ‘I promise to try not to shoot you, but if I do shoot you it will be by mistak
e and I apologize in advance.’
“The plan was executed. And that, more or less, is the basis of why I believe what I believe. My beliefs are based on my first impressions of Dan, particularly how he could rub people up the wrong way. I can see that you don’t understand what I’ve just said. But I have to ask you now, for something. If I tell you any more it can only be after you’ve given me your solemn oath that you will never, ever divulge that you heard it from me. Can you do that?”
Philomena pondered this for a moment. “You want me to give you my oath that I’ll never let on that you told me what you’re about to?”
“I’m not going to tell you unless you give me your oath,” said Jonathan.
“I, Philomena Bligh, give you my oath.”
“That was too easy,” said Jonathan. “Look, if I tell you, you might be enraged, and you might want to do something, and in that frame of mind you might forget, or choose to set aside your oath to me. What I’m asking is that you do whatever you feel you have to do, but that you’re careful to ensure that I could not be your only possible source.”
“Do you want me to say that I’ve never met you?” she offered; whatever it took to make him go on.
“No, that lie would be too easily apprehended,” said Jonathan. “What I mean is I need you to make it as difficult as possible for anyone to know that I’m your source, because what I’ll tell you, if I tell you, is disputed, and denied, and so far unprovable, and I’ve been threatened by a top-top lawyer with a slander suit and jail if I repeat it verbally, and a libel charge and jail if I ever write it and pass it on. So if I tell you what I might tell you, you mustn’t leave this cafe and go straight to people claiming that I’ve told you. You have to appear to have unearthed it yourself, or been told by someone other than me.”
“I swear,” confirmed Philomena. “I understand, and I swear.”
“You can swear but you can’t really understand because I haven’t told you yet,” said Jonathan. He bent his head, indicating that she should bend hers, and, heads almost touching, in a lowered voice, he told her, “I’m trusting you.”
She nodded, wondering if he was actually mad and there wasn’t going to be any import in what he might tell her.
“In Dan’s memory,” he added.
They were so close she could feel the heat from his head. To see his earnest eyes she had to lean away sideways and turn toward him.
“Yes,” she said.
“Okay, then,” said Jonathan, sitting back a little, checking around him. “A short while later, on the tenth of November to be exact, me and Dan were in a trench lying up. It was a German trench; marvelous construction. We were advancing. Everyone was talking about how an armistice was rumored for the next day, but nothing was confirmed. Dan and I had managed to arrange things in a sort of unacknowledged way so that we knew where each other was most of the time but didn’t mention it. You didn’t want to get too close to anyone. Well, you did and you didn’t. You wanted friends but they had a habit of dying, so you didn’t want them. He’d been hinting about the rift with his parents; he wasn’t going to take over the shop, was he?”
“No,” said Philomena, “he didn’t know what he was going to do.”
“I was lucky,” said Jonathan. “My parents could afford to keep me in school, then I got a scholarship. Despite that I wasn’t clever.”
“You must have been.”
“No, I worked hard, feverishly so, because of what my parents sacrificed to invest in me.”
“You’re clever now.”
“If I am, I’ve been trained to be,” said Jonathan. “A lot of it is learning the accent. Contrary to what they would have you believe, the way the people who run things speak is an accent, rather than the ‘right’ way. This accent lends authority and gives the impression of intelligence. Anyway, from down the trench we could hear someone barking ‘ATTENTION.’ It was a sergeant acknowledging a new officer, a captain. He looked a bit sheepish, this captain. Right uniform, right stance, but not completely at home in it.
“We’d got used to slouching about when it was quiet. We could have stood up and greeted the captain, but we didn’t. We did sit up a bit straighter, though. There was a boy, a private, carrying his luggage. An old trunk. I could see it had labels: Cape Town, Shanghai, Khartoum. Me and Dan took an interest in Captain Anthony Dore, for it was he.”
Philomena leaned forward, anticipating that he was about to give an explanation for his extreme reaction last evening to Anthony Dore’s name.
“We weren’t rude to him, apart from not getting to our feet on the very fine German duck boards, which wasn’t rude as such; more informal. But he and Dan took each other the wrong way from the start. Dore introduced himself: ‘I’m Captain Anthony Dore,’ and I stood up, but Dan didn’t. Dan said ‘Congratulations,’ and left a little pause as if that’s all he was going to say, as if he was congratulating Dore on being himself, or on remembering his own name. It was a real moment of uncertainty until Dan followed his potentially sarcastic congratulations with, ‘on joining the best bit of the line, sir.’ Which just about saved it, but still managed to point to the fact that Dore was the new man. I noticed too that Dan had coarsened his accent and I knew that this was because Dore was so posh. ‘You are?’ Dore asked Dan. ‘Second Lieutenant Case, sir,’ said Dan, then added, ‘promoted in the field’; which again could have been interpreted as a bit of a dig at the captain; i.e. ‘I’ve earned my commission whereas you are just posh.’
“I could see that they’d got off on the wrong foot so I introduced myself to Captain Dore much more politely but, I have to confess, I did play my native accent up a bit so Dore knew where we all were. He asked me if I was the senior officer present, which I was, along with him—but when I jokingly said ‘apart from you’ he took it the wrong way, and he asked: ‘What are your orders, at this moment?’—knowing that we definitely hadn’t been ordered to slouch in a captured German trench. There must have been some orders to be actually getting on with, something to do with winning the war.
“Anyway, I caught Dan’s eye in the corner of mine and I felt like I was in church: the vicar’s paused in his very long sermon, it’s deathly quiet, and the old lady in front lets go a fart. In short, I got the giggles. Dan, in an effort to make me laugh out loud, said, ‘Standing orders are to win the war, Captain Dore.’ And I could barely hold it in, and Dore thought it was about him, which it was in a way. I managed to speak, to say that there had been a skirmish earlier, that is, explained why we were lounging about now; we were knackered. But Dan kept going, and said something stupid—with a completely straight face, like ‘They defend, we attack; we attack, they defend,’ declining defend. ‘I attack, we attack, they attack.’
“Dore interrupted but didn’t look at him and he asked me who held the ruin that was the only thing you could see from our trench. It had once been a farmhouse but now it was just bits of wall. The enemy had it that day, but it had been ours several times, I told him, and I saw something change in Anthony Dore and he said that we were going to make it ours again in the morning. I told him we’d left it because they’d brought up a captured tank and he asked whether ‘retreating’ had been good for our morale. He was suggesting we’d given in a bit too easily, that we lacked backbone, but I tried to stay calm as I explained that the decision to retreat hadn’t been anything to do with morale, it was a strategic decision taken higher up, but he cut me off saying that we had new orders to press on and occupy as much ground as we could because the Kaiser had abdicated. Now this was potentially very good news. It definitely meant the war might be about to end. But Dore wasn’t celebrating. When I looked deep into his eyes I could see he was a mess. I’d seen that look before, many times. His nerves were shot. He didn’t like me seeing that. It made him turn away from me to Dan and he said, straightforwardly: ‘You may be a good soldier, but some people could take you the wrong way.’”
Philomena assumed, because he’d got Dan off to a tee, that the way Jona
than transformed when giving Anthony Dore’s contributions was an accurate impersonation of him: the heightened accent, the clipped vowels, the angle of the head.
“At this point Dan could have accepted this half a peace offering and things might have ended up differently, but Dan was being bloody obstinate by now as well as borderline insolent, and he replied, ‘Some people shouldn’t try to take me at all.’ I winced, and, not for the first time I thought to myself that one day Daniel Case was going to land me right in the you-know-what. Dan gave Anthony Dore his biggest grin as if to say that the whole episode had been a joke and assured him that everything would be all right. He told Captain Anthony Dore that he loved fighting armored vehicles with his bare hands. It was clear Dore didn’t know what on earth to make of Dan. He didn’t have a clue how to handle him. Which was how Dan liked it. Lastly, Dore made another attempt at making things the way he thought they should be. He said, in a way that a friendly captain would say to a subordinate officer, which Dan was but I wasn’t, ‘Let’s have dinner tonight, on me,’ indicating that his trunk contained victuals. When Captain Dore moved on I turned on Dan, but he wasn’t having it. He did apologize later. He thought I was too much in awe of men like Dore.”
Jonathan looked at Philomena for a long while and seemed about to say something else. But he didn’t, he said: “D’ye want more tea?”
She shook her head.
“I’m going to have some, and a bacon sarnie,” he said, briskly.
“Okay then,” she said, changing her mind.
The extraordinary detail of his story made Philomena uneasy. Why could he recall so much of that encounter? The cafe had emptied a little and there was no longer a queue at the counter so he was able to catch a woman’s eye and shout the order before continuing in full spate.
“So me and Dan were treated by Dore that night to a hamper of the finest tins of this and jars of that and bottles of the other, and we were all a bit merry. The conversation wasn’t flowing as easily as the drink, but the atmosphere was at least convivial, and I could see that while Anthony Dore wasn’t at ease with Dan, he was drawn to him. And when Dore said that regarding the next morning’s planned attack of the ruin, ‘We must continue to impose our will on the enemy,’ I could tell that he was inviting arguments against the attack and that it wouldn’t have taken much for him to agree that it was a bad idea and to go to whoever ordered it and tell them so, especially if the war was ending. But before Dan or I could give Dore the answer I think he would have liked another man entered the dugout. A Major Chiltern.
Armistice Page 6