Fall of Poppies

by Heather Webb

  “Yes. I wanted it very much.”

  “You say this over and over, in the hospital. I make you promise to find her. Here.” She nudges his stomach with the edge of the envelope. “Take. She is yours, not mine.”

  “Claude.” Hélène’s head lands smack between his shoulder blades, her arms around his waist. “Is this a lover of yours? Shall we bring her upstairs with us?”

  Octavian wants to crawl out of his own skin. He wants to climb from inside his own head. He wants to touch Gertrude’s cheek, he wants to caress her hair, he wants to kneel on the stones and rend himself. He takes the envelope.

  “There it is,” she says. “Now good-­bye.”

  “Wait! You can’t go out there alone!”

  “I cannot stay.” Withering voice.

  He tries to place his hand on the door, but she ducks beneath his elbow and forces the latch to lift.

  “Gertrude, please.”

  She turns in the doorway. Her face is shadowed now. “May God bless you, Mr. Rofrano”—­and then she’s gone, and Octavian is just a solid pillar of flesh, holding an envelope, staring into nothing.

  Hélène yawns and tugs his shirt. “A great pity. She is so pretty. A German girl, isn’t she? How do you know her?”

  Octavian waits until the footsteps merge into the traffic on the other side of the wall, until she’s gone. Gone where? If only he could move. He says quietly, “She rescued me when I was shot down, on the last day of the war. She brought me to the hospital.”

  “Ah, did she nurse you back to health? It is so romantic.”

  “No. She wasn’t a nurse. But she visited me, every day, until I was well enough to be moved to a French hospital. She read to me. English books, mostly. She wanted to improve her English, she said.” Octavian hesitates. “I shot her father.”

  “Mon Dieu! You shot him, really? Did he die?”

  “Yes.”

  “And then she saves you?” Hélène laughs. “She is a saint, I think.”

  A saint. Is that how you describe Gertrude? Only she hadn’t performed any miracles, really, unless you count an act of grace such as the one Gertrude performed on that November forest floor a miracle. A sign from God that it was possible to forgive another’s sins, even when your own heart was steeped in grief. That you could actually purchase a human soul by the coin of mercy.

  Octavian says, “She brought me the telegram about my mother. The news that my mother died of the influenza.”

  “Mon Dieu. And you did not marry her for this?”

  “It wasn’t like that.”

  Hélène snorts. “Not for you, maybe. Poor girl. What did she give you?”

  “It’s a photograph. A photograph I thought I’d lost.”

  “Your sweetheart?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “May I see her?”

  “No.”

  She laughs. “Poor Gertrude. She’s a virgin, no?”

  “Yes.”

  “Ah, well. Nobody is perfect.” She sighs wetly against his shirt. “You, too, isn’t it so?”

  “No. I’m not perfect at all.”

  “No, I mean you are a virgin, yes? You are also a virgin.”

  Octavian looks down at the envelope, on which his name is printed in careful block letters. CAPTAIN O. N. ROFRANO, U.S.A.A.S. He slides his fingers across the ink and discovers the stiffness inside, the square edges of the photograph, rescued from the fallen leaves. Has she survived the damp and the rot? Is Sophie’s face still intact, or is she now obscured?

  “I thought so,” Hélène says. “You can always tell. But come upstairs.”

  “Wait. Just—­a moment.”

  Her hand slides to his elbow. “Come. There is no shame, Captain. I will show you how it is done. You are going to be a great lover, another Casanova, and then maybe when you have learned all these important lessons, you will go back to your pretty German girl and give her much pleasure.”

  He wants to tell her that he’s not ashamed, at least about that, and that he’s an unlikely candidate for a second Casanova, or even a third. That he can’t possibly face Gertrude again. But maybe she’s right. Maybe, in the aftermath of apocalypse, the only shame that remains is innocence. Maybe Gertrude has come to Paris on a fool’s errand. Maybe he’s better off without this envelope in his hands; maybe he should toss what remains of Sophie Faninal in the nearest dustbin, like a piece of furniture that is no longer in fashion. Maybe Sophie doesn’t even exist at all.

  Octavian shoves the envelope in his pocket and gives in to the persistent tug of Hélène’s hand at his elbow. The whisky is wearing off, and his head is painfully sharp. He opens the door to the stairwell and leads Hélène up the worn wooden steps, flight by flight, her bony little hand like a claw inside his closed palm. She stops for breath on the fourth-­floor landing, and it’s so dark—­the bulb’s been out for weeks—­he can see only her outline against the smudged wall as she pants and laughs, holding her hand to her chest. He puts his arm around her waist and lifts her.

  Once inside his attic room, she looks around in a sort of amazed contempt. “But it’s so shabby! I didn’t know you were so poor. You don’t look poor.”

  “It’s home.” He hands her a cigarette and lights it, and then one for himself. She thanks him and smokes for a moment in silence, next to the window, one arm folded beneath the other, regarding him without blinking from beneath her thick black eyelashes, like a dare. She is smiling a little.

  “You are like a statue, monsieur,” she says at last. “Don’t you want to know what happens next?”

  He doesn’t feel like a statue. His heart is smacking, his blood is running mad. His skin is hot. His mouth is full of smoke.

  He nods his head yes.

  She turns around and gestures with her cigarette to the fastenings of her dress. He steps forward and fumbles away, until the sleeves—­such as they are—­fall suddenly from from her shoulders and she wriggles free and kicks the dress aside. She takes his two hands in her two hands and draws them around her waist, up the ridge of her rib cage, until he’s holding her breasts in his palms. They are soft, and a little heavier than he remembers from the taxi, warm and pliable and exciting, and he thinks, God, so this is what it’s like, to hold a girl’s breasts in your two hands, thank you. She makes a breathless noise, straining upward against his hands, and he closes his eyes and rests his mouth against Hélène’s short, dark hair.

  “Ah, Claude,” she sobs. “It’s so good. Claude, I need it.”

  Outside, the sky is a metropolitan purple, and the opposite rooftop catches a bit of empty silver moon, and it’s like there are no more ­people in the world, everyone is dead, and just he and Hélène remain to populate the earth. Her flesh shudders under his hand, and he realizes she’s crying.

  “All right,” he says in English. “Hush, now.”

  He reaches in his jacket pocket for a handkerchief and draws Hélène onto the threadbare sofa. For perhaps an hour he holds her in his lap, while her sharp bones dig into his stomach and his groin, and her chest quivers against his, settling eventually into a flaccid sleep. He watches the progress of the moon outside, and when he wakes up into the pink dawn, Hélène is gone, and there’s no sign that she even existed there, or that the incident ever occurred, except for the stub of her cigarette, stained very faintly with lipstick, in the bottom of an empty glass on the table.

  And the envelope, still sealed, which he tucks into the pocket of his suitcase just before he leaves Paris the next morning.

  The Photograph

  Kate Kerrigan

  Dublin, 2016

  BRIDIE WASN’T HAPPY.

  Her London-­based daughter, Sharon, had been back in Dublin for less than three hours and she and her brother were already fighting. Sharon was home for a commemoration ceremony for the 1916 Uprising, in which Bridie’s grandf
ather, Seamus O’Hara, was being honored. The president was hosting the event in his palace in Dublin’s Phoenix Park and Bridie would receive a special medal on her grandfather’s behalf, along with her father’s cousin, Liam Maheady, whose own father was also being honored. Their ancestors’ glittering careers in the Irish Republican Army had defined the O’Hara family for generations.

  The whole country was alive with talk of the event and tickets were like gold dust. All had been fine, until Sharon announced that she wanted to bring her new boyfriend to the event.

  “It’s a 1916 commemoration, Sharon,” her brother Frank was saying, “a celebration of the end of eight hundred years of oppression from the English. Our great-­grand-­grandfather led the revolution. So no, you can’t bring some bastard British soldier along as your date!”

  “Are you going to let him talk to me like that? Anyway it’s not up to you. It’s up to Mam. Mam?”

  At thirty and thirty-­four they still needed their mammy to referee their fights.

  She hated when the kids behaved like this. Tomorrow was an important day for her. A time for remembering the past, honoring her ancestors, and remembering how they had fought to free their country from English rule. Her great-­uncle, Padraig, had been shot dead for the part he had played in the Easter Rising, and her grandfather, Seamus, his younger brother, had gone on to become an IRA captain. This was a time for remembering the great things her family had done. Why did the kids have to ruin everything with their squabbling? Why did they always have to make everything about them?

  Her son, Frank, was such an angry young man. He channeled it into revolutionary, left-­wing politics, but Bridie wondered if that was such a good idea. Frank had inherited a social conscience from his forebears and that was good, but it didn’t seem to be getting him anywhere. Mostly he just went to demonstrations, where he got himself wound up into an angry state. His sister was quite the opposite; no thought of anything beyond looking gorgeous and having fun. This was so typical of Sharon, bringing a soldier boyfriend to this, of all things. Lord knows she’d dated half the men in London at this stage. She could have easily invited that nice real estate agent from Wembley that Bridie’s sister had fixed her up with. But no. There had to be a drama.

  Thank God Sharon at least had the sense to book them both into a hotel, where she had left this “Dave” so she could slug it out with her brother.

  Bridie, trying to stay calm, reached across the kitchen table and adjusted the feathers on her elaborate fascinator. It was the same shade of violent green as the dress and cropped suit jacket she was wearing. The outfit had been a horrible mistake. She had wanted to wear green as a patriot, but the shade had looked much softer in the shop. It wasn’t until she saw it under her own kitchen lights that she realized how garish it was. On top of that the style made her look ancient. It was a real-­great-­aunt-­of-­the-­bride monstrosity. However, it had cost a fortune and it was too late to take it back now.

  “Calm down, Frank. Your sister can bring who she likes although perhaps . . .”

  “Perhaps what?” Sharon snapped.

  “Well, this . . .”

  “Dave.”

  “Yes—­Dave might not feel comfortable there himself. So maybe it’s not such a good idea . . .”

  Frank let out a triumphant snort while Bridie continued.

  “I mean, this is a family day and I know you like him . . .”

  Sharon closed her eyes in disgust, then opened them and glared at her mother.

  “He’s not just ‘someone I like,’ Mam—­he’s my fiancé.”

  “What?” Frank shouted. “You can’t marry a Brit.”

  “You’re engaged?” Bridie said. She tried to sound interested but frankly, she wasn’t surprised. Sharon had been engaged at least twice before, that she knew about.

  “I love him, Mam,” she said, and she really looked like she meant it. Bridie believed her, but then, she’d loved the other lads, too.

  “Ah yeah, I forgot,” Frank said meanly. “You’re only after the ring, anyway—­you’ll never marry him.”

  “This time it’s different.” Sharon was looking at her mother now with a strange, pleading expression on her face.

  “Of course it is, because you have stooped even lower than usual with a British bastard.”

  “No, actually,” Sharon said before turning angrily to her brother and shouting into his face, “It’s because I’m pregnant!”

  Bridie jolted. Jesus.

  She couldn’t take it in. Pregnant? Was Sharon serious?

  Behind her daughter’s heavily made-­up face she saw her little girl’s expression crumble, and Bridie knew it was true.

  This was too much. Really.

  She raised her hands in surrender to her shock. Sharon turned to her and said, “I’m sorry, Mam. I was going to tell you later but . . .”

  Bridie shook her head and left the room.

  “I can’t take this in . . .”

  “You stupid bastard—­see what you’ve done now!” Sharon hissed at her brother as Bridie went upstairs.

  Bridie’s bedroom was her sanctuary. She had grown up in this house in Dublin’s north inner city, just around the corner from Collin’s Barracks Museum. After her parents died, she and Jim bought the house from her siblings. Jim had overhauled the place, turning it into a city-­pad palace for the two of them to enjoy after the kids were gone. There had been so much for them to look forward to, but soon after the building work was finished, Jim announced he was leaving her. He “wanted more out of life.” Of course, he had met another woman. Somebody not much younger than them both, but single. A career woman; his new boss, actually. Lisa was “the opposite” of Bridie, Jim said. He had made it sound like that was a good thing.

  Bridie sat on the edge of her bed and looked out the window. There were crowds of ­people going into the museum. Life happening, she thought. Too much life. A baby. Trying to center herself after the shocking news, she turned her attention back into the room. After Jim had left her Bridie realized that she had lost touch with “who she was.” Marriage and motherhood had clouded her sense of identity, so with the kids grown up and Jim gone, Bridie set out on a quest to find out “who” she was. She started by investigating her own roots and family history, which was how she learned all about her grandfather’s part in the revolution. She dug out all the old artifacts and pictures from her own family history and put them in her old marital bedroom. There was something certain in history, a dependable truth in knowing where you came from. It made her feel secure.

  Up on the mantelpiece was her grandfather’s IRA medals from the war of independence. They were displayed on velvet in a mahogany box frame. The brave soldier, the great war man—­one hundred years later and his ideals and his desire for freedom from British colonial rule were still bearing down on her family. Bridie sometimes feared that her son might sign up for one of these criminal paramilitary spin-­offs that were always springing up in a misguided attempt to replicate his family’s republican heritage. On a softer note, on the dressing table in front of her was a framed photograph of her great-­aunt Eileen. Eileen was her grandfather’s sister, and the picture was of her as a glamorous young woman standing in her uniform outside the National Gallery of Ireland, where she had once worked as a coat-­check girl. She was so beautiful and yet Eileen had died a “spinster.” Living with her brother’s family for much of her adult life, Eileen had been like a second mother to Bridie. As she held the ancient picture, Bridie said out loud, “Weren’t you the wise woman never getting married,” then, enjoying the feeling of talking to the spirit of her beloved aunt, she added, “This frame is in a terrible state, Eileen. I think you deserve a new one.”

  Just as she said those words the flimsy, ancient piece of cardboard backing came away from its rusted tacks and the frame fell apart in Bridie’s hands.

  As she rescued the
picture from the glass, Bridie noticed there was another photograph behind the one of her grandmother.

  As she pulled it out from the crumbling piece of black velveteen it was mounted on, Bridie was astonished to find the photograph was of a young man. More surprisingly still, he was a British soldier in full military uniform.

  East London, April 1918

  NINETEEN-­YEAR-­OLD SOLDIER CLIVE Postlethwaite stood in front of the photographer’s backdrop. It was a bucolic image of the English countryside; the sort of landscape he had only ever seen from a train. He shuffled awkwardly toward the spot marked X on the floor, then smoothed down his hair and placed his private’s beret across his freshly cropped head.

  Clive was home on a few days’ leave before being sent over to Dublin where he was to play his part in quashing the Irish revolution. It had been his father’s idea that he get the photograph taken. George Postlethwaite had a friend who worked at a studio in Marlebone who said he could get him a good price. He was proud of his son and wanted to record Clive’s first big step into manhood. This studio was one of the biggest in London. They could turn the picture around in three days, plenty of time before his son headed of f to war.

  “Put your leg up on this,” said the photographer, sliding a small wooden box across the floor, “and loop your thumb into your belt. It’ll make you look more manly.”

  Clive felt stupid, standing there in front of a stranger, all dressed up like this. He vaguely remembered when he was seven and his mother had taken him to have his picture taken while they were on holiday in Blackpool. They had put him in a cowboy costume, but he had hated the feeling of being “somebody else.” He had screamed and cried. It had taken them ages to calm him down enough to get the picture. In his army uniform, Clive felt like he was still in fancy dress. It wasn’t just the outfit that was uncomfortable, it was the whole thing. Clive knew he had to play his part, he knew the freedom of the world was at stake. But all the same, being in the army just did not sit right with him.