The Blasphemer

by Nigel Farndale

  Daniel made as if to say something but rubbed his arms instead. His jacket was saturated, the fibres gorged with rain.

  ‘They liked to give the trenches familiar names, to make the men feel at home. They were quite homely. By the summer of nineteen seventeen, they had had two years to work on these trench systems. The engineering was very sophisticated.’ The rain had turned to a fine drizzle. Clive held out his hand. ‘Think it’s more or less stopped. Come with me. I want to show you something in the Land Rover. Are you coming, Philip?’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘You coming over to the car?’

  ‘Actually I need to go back to our car for something.You go.’

  ‘Can you take this with you, Dad?’ Daniel handed over the HP bottle.

  Clive kept up the chatter as he bustled along. ‘I should think he’s sick of hearing me bore on about Passchendaele.We work together on the War Graves Commission, you know.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Expect he’s told you all about it?’

  ‘The commission?’

  ‘Passchendaele.’

  ‘Not really.You know what he’s like.’

  ‘He is quite …’ Clive looked over his shoulder. ‘What’s the word?’

  ‘Taciturn?’

  ‘Well, empty vessels like me make most noise.’

  ‘Some find him rude. I think it’s because he’s a bit deaf. Finds it hard to join in. He can go days, even weeks, without talking.’

  ‘So what would you like to know?’

  Daniel looked at his father’s straight back as he was walking away. ‘Did he ask you to give me a history lesson?’

  Clive grinned as he unlocked a Land Rover, raised his blotchy hands and described an arc. ‘On the occasions when the rain lifted, foaming black smoke hung over the landscape, blotting out the sun. More than half a million British and German troops were killed during the fighting here – and often the dead would be buried under a deluge of soil, only to be disinterred by the next shell and reburied by the next. In the summer months, those bodies left on the surface would either be eaten by rats or stripped down to the skeleton by maggots, a process which took eight days. And it stank like the cauldron of hell: cordite, mustard, putrefying horseflesh.’

  ‘What was the first day like?’

  Clive pointed with his umbrella to a distant spinney. ‘The British took the Pilckem Ridge over there, one of their objectives. But we had twenty-seven thousand killed, wounded and missing that day. The Germans a similar number. In his diary entry for the first of August, Field Marshal Haig recorded the thirty-first of July as “a fine day’s work”. He described the losses as “small”.’

  Daniel puckered his lips as he took this in. He looked at the grassland around him and nodded as he saw it was still dimpled and cratered by shells. He looked back towards Ypres but could not see its spires through the rain. When he turned back to his guide he was fifteen yards away standing on a block of concrete, holding a large scroll and signalling for Daniel to join him.

  ‘This,’ Clive said, tapping the block with the scroll, ‘is a German pillbox. Ferrous concrete. When your great-grandfather went over the top on the first day here he would have seen whole battalions reduced to husks by the Devil’s Paintbrush. That’s what the Tommies called the Maxim gun. They placed them on the top of these.’ He stamped his foot. ‘This whole salient,’ another sweep of his arms, ‘was a quagmire. Liquid mud. Soldiers who slipped from the duckboards drowned. Marching men were ordered to ignore the cries for help.To stop with a battalion behind you on a slippery duckboard eighteen inches wide was impossible.’

  With the spires of Ypres becoming visible through the mist behind him, Clive unscrolled the black and white panoramic photograph he had collected from his Land Rover. He asked Daniel to take one end. It was fifteen feet long and showed a charred and jagged landscape that was almost featureless apart from barbed wire and a few splintered tree stumps over on the Passchendaele Ridge. ‘This is the view your great-grandfather would have had on the morning of the attack,’ he said. ‘Would you fancy heading out into that?’

  Daniel shook his head. ‘Can’t say I would.’

  Back at the car, they found Philip asleep in the passenger seat, his mouth open. His skin looked grey. He was holding the HP bottle in his hand.

  Daniel tapped on the window. ‘You OK, Dad?’

  ‘Mm? Oh … Had a bad night.’

  Daniel found himself driving slowly along the road to Nieppe. It seemed the respectful thing to do.

  An elderly woman with hair like cauliflower was leaning out of a window halfway up a grey block of flats in the centre of Nieppe. Unsupported by teeth, her mouth had folded in on itself. She was staring at the big car with the English number plates that had parked below her – and, as she watched with clouded eyes, a lithe and delicate-faced man got out of the driver’s side and walked over to a board showing a map of the town. The man studied the board for a moment, tapped it twice, looked up and smiled at the old woman. When she did not return the smile, he looked down the street he had come from and, with his hands on his hips, nodded to himself. A warm breeze was picking up, blowing grit down the street in flurries.

  Though blighted by satellite dishes, Nieppe was more wholesome than other towns that marked the line of what had once been the Western Front. It had a country market feel to it, with dusty hens scratching around and several loose-skinned cats resting their bones on garden walls. There were fuchsia-filled baskets swaying from porches and streets lined with poplars. Most of the houses were of red brick and some of them – the main difference between this and the other towns through which they had passed – appeared to be original, having survived the Great War. The canal looked clean – clean enough for fish to live in, judging by the anglers on its banks. The Château de Nieppe looked sooty and neglected, but its slender turret was solidly intact. Daniel walked back to the car and opened the passenger door. ‘We’re on the Rue d’Armentières, Dad,’ he said. ‘The main road through the town.The road we want is behind that church over there.’ He wagged a finger towards a steeple. ‘May as well leave the car here and walk.You feeling up to that?’

  With Daniel acting as traffic policeman, Philip tapped his way across the main road, but his progress was slow and a woman holding the hem of her skirt down against the gathering wind easily overtook him. When he reached the other side, Philip waved his stick in gratitude at a waiting car. They cut through a narrow alley and across a cobbled square that brought them out on to the Rue des Chardonnerets. According to the files Philip had seen in the National Archives, the house at which Andrew Kennedy had been arrested was Number 11. It was a modestly sized, gable-ended dwelling with a slate roof and boarded-up windows. Graffiti about Le Pen had been sprayed on the boards. Father and son looked at one another and shrugged despondently before walking back the way they had come.They continued past the car, around a fountain that spouted no water, and up towards the town hall: an old stuccofronted building from the Napoleonic era. It had a Tricolour draped down one side of its stone frontage and an EU flag down the other. Engraved across its façade were the words MAIRIE DE NIEPPE and below this: LIBERTÉ. EGALITÉ. FRATERNITÉ. Daniel spoke in pidgin French to the receptionist and was directed to the land registry department. There he approached a young clerk who was reading a text on her phone and handed her a piece of paper with ‘11 Rue des Chardonnerets, Nieppe’ written on it. He explained he was after any information on the building, anything at all. The clerk returned ten minutes later with a thin file.

  ‘That house has been empty for the past four years, monsieur. The Lemarre family last owned it. They bought it in nineteen seventy-three. Before that it had been in the same family for forty years.’

  ‘Do you know the name of that family?’

  She handed over the file. It was warm from her hands. ‘Their name was Boudain.They had bought it in nineteen thirty-three. It’s in there.’

  ‘Does it say who lived there before that?’ Dan
iel asked as he flicked through the pages.

  The clerk sighed testily as she took the documents back. ‘Camier.’ She snapped the file shut and drummed her fingers on it.

  ‘You wouldn’t happen to know where they moved to, would you?’

  ‘No.’ She resumed her texting, stopped and raked her hair to one side. ‘I think there is a Camier family living on the Rue d’Armentières, opposite the Hyundai garage. One of them did some decorating for my father.’

  The wind determined the slow pace, with Philip, his stick tapping the pavement, bowed like a spinnaker before it. But when they found the garage, they slowed down even more, as if they were both prolonging the journey, to postpone any disappointment they might have at their destination. They looked at one another before knocking on the door. After half a minute it opened on a chain.

  ‘Oui?’ A woman’s voice.

  ‘Madame Camier?’ Daniel said.

  A finger appeared and pointed next door.

  When Daniel knocked, an unshaven man in his fifties answered. He was wearing a vest. His fingers were nicotine yellow.

  ‘Oui?’ More a grunt than a word.

  ‘Parlez-vous anglais?’

  ‘Small.’

  ‘We are trying to trace a relative of ours. He lived in Nieppe during the Great War.’

  ‘Here?’

  ‘No. He lived on the Rue des Chardonnerets. His landlady was called Adilah Camier.We were told a family by the name of Camier live here.’

  The man scratched his belly and cocked his head to the other side as he studied the two strangers in his doorway.

  ‘She was married to Henri Camier.’ The voice was as dry as wood bark. It belonged to an old woman.The man stepped to one side and a stooping figure waved them in. She had a leathery face framed with the grey tendrils of a carelessly assembled bun. ‘He was killed at Verdun. Come in, please.’

  Philip and Daniel followed her along a peeling hallway to a small sitting room that smelled of cat food and was dominated by a sunbleached poster of the Virgin Mary. She ushered them to sit down on a green sofa that had springs uncomfortably close to its surface. A cat jumped on to Daniel’s lap. A wind chime sounded in another room. The man in the vest went noisily upstairs and the old lady disappeared and reappeared with two cans of lemon Fanta and a bowl of Twiglets on a tray. ‘After Henri died, Adilah met an Englishman, a soldier. She had a child by him. Please …’ She pulled the ring on one of the cans and handed it to Daniel. ‘You are thirsty, I think.’

  The can was sweating condensation and so cold it made Daniel’s hand tingle. As he drank he watched the old lady rummage in first one drawer of a dresser then another. She was slight and wan, as if painted in watercolour rather than oil. A trick of the eye, he concluded – no electric lamps were on and, as the afternoon was overcast, the light that was floating in through the sash windows was soft and grainy. She pulled out a shoebox of small sepia photographs and began to sift through them. After a long minute, she held one up and looked at what was written on the back. It showed a handsome woman with hauntingly pale eyes. She was wearing her hair down around her shoulders and the empty sleeve of one arm pinned up. In the other arm she carried an infant wrapped in a cot blanket. ‘This is her.’

  The front door opened, a growl of wind carried through the house. It swung shut again. Philip looked up briefly; returned his gaze to the photograph. ‘So she was your … ?’

  ‘Adilah Camier was my aunt. No, my great-aunt. I get confused. My memory.’ The old woman was studying the scarred rump of Philip’s missing ear. ‘It is many years since I have been to England. I used to go there for school trips. I taught English for …’ She trailed off. ‘You are from London?’

  ‘Yes,’ Philip said. ‘Kew. Daniel here lives in Clapham. I’m sorry, we haven’t introduced ourselves properly. My name is Philip Kennedy. This is my son, Daniel.’

  ‘My name is Marie Camier.’ The old woman held out a small and liver-spotted hand. Philip took it in his. ‘I have visited Kew. They have a wonderful garden there.’

  ‘We’re very close to it.’

  ‘You said you were tracing a relative?’

  Philip hesitated. ‘The English soldier you mentioned, he was my grandfather. Andrew Kennedy. He died in the Great War …’ He hesitated again. Handed the photograph of Adilah to Daniel. ‘I think Adilah’s child might have been my father. I never knew him. He was killed, too, fighting the Germans in the Second World War.’ He took a sip of Fanta.

  ‘What was your father’s name?’

  ‘William.’

  The old lady nodded. She was staring at Philip’s muddy shoes now. ‘Yes, I believe the child was given an English name.’

  ‘As far as I’ve been able to work out, what happened was this …’ Philip tapped the palm of his left hand with two fingers of his right. ‘Andrew Kennedy, my grandfather, already had a wife in England. Her name was Dorothy. I always assumed that Dorothy was my grandmother because she was the one who raised my father.’

  ‘On her own?’

  ‘No, she lived with a man called Will Macintyre. He had been a friend of my grandfather’s.They had both been plumbers in Market Drayton before the First World War and had joined up together and come to France. My father was named after him … What I don’t understand is how Adilah’s baby, my father, came to be living in England.’

  The old woman smiled, exposing discoloured teeth. ‘You know that Adilah died in La Grippe, the great flu epidemic?’

  ‘No, I didn’t know that. In nineteen nineteen?’

  ‘Oui. This plumber …’

  ‘Will Macintyre.’

  ‘I heard about him. He must have been the one who returned to France after the war to help rebuild Ypres. He came here to Nieppe to see Adilah. Then, when she died, he took the baby back with him to England. I always knew …’ The sentence was left unfinished. ‘He came back, you know.’

  ‘Who did?’

  ‘The plumber.’

  ‘Will?’

  ‘I get confused. It must have been in the nineteen fifties. I met him.’

  ‘You met Will?’

  The old woman touched her head. ‘I mean your grandfather, don’t I? Who was Will? My mind is not what it was.’

  Ten minutes later, back at the car, they found a note left under the wiper. It was a complaint that they were blocking someone’s drive. Philip spread his map out on the bonnet. ‘There is a village called Le Bizet five miles away,’ he said, prodding the map. ‘That was where Andrew was taken to be court-martialled after his arrest. He was held in the police station there and executed in the grounds. It’s on the way back so we may as well take a look. I’ll drive if you like.’

  Daniel tossed the keys over the roof. Philip missed them. As they were putting on their seat belts, a cloying smell of urine became noticeable. Daniel surreptitiously wound the car window down. He slid his finger along the screen of his iPhone, waited a second and tapped the internet icon. He tapped again and studied a webpage for a minute. ‘There’s a page here on the psychology of firing squads. Says that because no single member of the squad could save the condemned man’s life by not firing, the moral incentive to disobey the order to shoot was reduced. The phenomenon is known as “diffusion of responsibility”.’

  Philip was gritting his teeth.

  Daniel stared at him, then back at his screen. ‘In some cases,’ he continued, ‘one member of the squad was issued with a gun containing a blank.The idea was that each member of the squad could hope beforehand that he was the one with the blank. It reduced flinching. It also allowed everyone to believe afterwards that he had not personally fired a fatal shot. Normally they could tell the difference between a blank and a live cartridge because of the recoil, but there was a psychological incentive not to pay attention to the recoil and, over time, to remember it as soft.’

  ‘I’ve heard that.’

  ‘Would Andrew have died instantly?’

  Philip slowed down as he approached a traffic light. Wh
en he stopped he looked across at his son. ‘Bullets fired at the chest boil volatile fats and rupture the heart, large blood vessels and lungs so that the victim dies of haemorrhage and shock. Death is nearly always instantaneous. But …’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I can’t quite put my finger on why …’

  ‘Why what?’

  ‘Why I think he somehow managed to survive the firing squad. Marie Camier said Will Macintyre had come back here in the fifties, but he died in the thirties. In nineteen thirty-four, as I recall. I have this feeling that … I think it might have been Andrew she met.’

  On the floor of his South West London bedsit, Hamdi was on his knees. A few feet away were the flip-flops he had taken off, neatly aligned, up against the wall. He touched his head to the small prayer rug that ensured the cleanliness of his place of prayer.The sajada, as the rug was known, was as much a compass as a threadbare oblong of embroidered colour, one that orientated him towards the centre of the world, towards the sacred black stone Ka’ba in Mecca. He rocked back on his heels, mumbled an ancient incantation to himself and made a gesture as if using his hands to splash his face with water – the elaborate ‘dry ablution’ ritual of the desert. Next he kissed his copy of the Koran, rolled the rug up and placed it on a chair before walking barefoot to his small bathroom.

  He looked in the mirror, picked up a pair of scissors and cut off the beard he had been growing for several weeks – he found it too itchy and distracting.The black hairs lay in the sink like a dead dog, an unclean animal, and he was able to gather them in two clumps and drop them in the pan. He removed his shirt next and squirted shaving foam on to the palm of his hand before dabbing it on to his face and chest. He started with the chest first, shaving upwards with his razor towards his neck, removing the few impure wisps that had grown back there. Next he shaved his cheeks and chin, carefully, turning his jaw on an angle to catch the light and ensure he had not missed any stubble. He splashed cold water on his face, an echo of the earlier gesture, and began again.When he had shaved a second time he squirted foam under his arms and, after removing his trousers and briefs, around his groin. This was a more delicate operation. He was smooth now, no longer corrupted by body hair. He ran a hand down his chest, enjoying the absence of friction.