The rider puts the letter back in the postbag. ‘Perhaps you should try for more sleep.’
‘What about you?’
‘Draw a little, I suppose.’
The dying man looks up at the walls, each etched with an assortment of images, the outlines of cottages, lanes and streets scored with a length of straw or a fingernail. One picture depicting a village church, monumental amid a wash of dunes.
‘Someone will puzzle you out one day,’ he says. ‘Just from those drawings. They’ll decipher you, like the pharaohs. No need even to sign yourself.’
The dying man’s name is Ingram, Leonard Geoffrey, a major with the 3rd King’s Dragoon Guards, and formerly the commander of an armoured car. His greater story being that he was brought in dead and came miraculously back to life. Or at least as good as dead when the Germans had passed him into the care of their Berber allies, who had dragged his body – the skin of his thigh and flank puckered with bullet wounds – into the rider’s den, to leave him untended. The new arrival exciting the rider to a state of panic. What should I do? How should I look after him? That nagging anxiety over a life put once more into his care.
He had bathed his fevered patient’s wounds with what little water his guards had allowed, and had watched over him with a benevolent uselessness, every now and then mopping his brow or gripping his arm in comradeship. Until after several days of impending mortality the major’s body had against all expectation reconstituted itself, the bullets oozing back through the skin like any common detritus, his colour and vitality gradually returning. ‘Where in God’s Hell are we?’ had been his first enquiry when he had found his voice. The rider doing his best to explain what he himself found inexplicable: that they had been consigned to some makeshift gaol – no grander than a village storehouse – to be guarded by weather-beaten farmers who would only pause from their goat herding or crop gathering to make sure their captives had not treacherously absconded. And occasionally to dispense bowls of the grain slop that passed for food. ‘That’s handy then,’ the major had announced, with the confidence of a man whose body will spit out bullets like old teeth. ‘We’ll just walk out of here. Right past them. They won’t dare lift a finger.’
And yet they had remained imprisoned, maddeningly coy in their ambitions, both lacking the boldness to push against that single wooden door which has no lock and which might so easily give way if they would only put themselves against it. Perhaps because both had feared their bodies might fail them had they tried, the rider still lamed from his injured knee, the major enduring a state of general frailty. It might at one time have been more a question of strategy: do we make off at night when they’re likely to be less alert?/Would they shoot us?/Are there Germans stationed nearby who might respond?/Might we have enough strength to run? They had even considered bribing their captors at one point. But then how does one tempt such austere people?
Any thoughts of escape had finally been given up when the major had suffered a relapse, his body stricken with a fresh bout of sickness, as though the bullets had not left without depositing some slow malignancy. At first nausea, then pallor and renewed fever, followed by intractable lassitude, both men agreeing on a likely cause of sepsis while recognising that any brand of infection might be the culprit. There’ll be no stupendous recovery this time, and both know it. The only marvel perhaps being the length of time the major might now eke out.
We need medicine, you stupid bastards! We need help!
But no use the rider screaming and raging, battering at the door. He’s done it many times and only once elicited a response, when one of the guards had opened the door and threatened to break a rifle butt across his face. The truth of it being that they are not necessarily expected to live.
Ingram stirs on his pallet of straw. ‘What’s the weather doing?’
‘Raining. Tipping it down. There might be a flood. Wash everything away. The Germans, the wogs, the whole lot.’
The major settles back again. ‘Good. Bloody good.’
Sometimes when inventing an outdoors for the major, the rider will draw from that inventory of images and episodes now restored to him, each excerpted from an as yet unfinished whole. A country lane striated with tree shadows, he at the controls of a motorcycle, Nell as pillion, her scarf flashing a brilliant white across his mirrors. A picnic outside a tavern on a canal towpath, long boats bisecting the perfectly reflected archway of a bridge. A terraced house in the same faded brick as its neighbours, its courtyard gated in black iron, its paved pathway leading to a vegetable allotment and Anderson shelter. All of these no less clear or well defined for those dysfunctional pathways in the brain, that unshifting filter of red.
But always alongside them those more disturbing vignettes that will leave him anxious and unsettled, their every visitation attended by the sound of familiar voices raised in panic, each given to the same frantic plea.
Skipper! What now?
And always he wants to answer, to reassure. But he can only ever feel his voice tumbling back down his throat. An awful slide into awareness. He’s at the end of his tether, that’s the problem. That’s what he wants to announce. You can’t know exactly where and when it’s going to happen – that final draining of fortitude – but the moment is unmistakable.
Skipper! Fuck’s sake!
Driver reverse! Sharp right, sharp right!
But not quick enough, the tank becoming for an instant a trembling bottle of sound, its skin vibrating with enough violence to stop a heart. White-hot sparks flinted into each congested chamber.
Then the screams of panic from those below. Jesus! Shit, shit, shit! Skipper! What now? Wireless op Hopgood-Banks gazing at him with headset dislodged, his features in a rictus of disbelief.
So this is what it feels like. That moment of abject helplessness, stretched pitilessly out.
The rider longs at times for Brinkhurst’s shaving mirror so that he might study himself in this new and reduced state. Fully bearded now, and thinner by far, his features – he assumes – brought to sharper definition. As a creature adapted to darkness he imagines his skin must be returning to its natural colour, his hair likewise. He might – ironically – become entirely himself before passing beyond recognition. Every so often he even has a pang for the attentions of Mawdsley; those cynical evaluations and disingenuous prognoses. A difficult sort to predict. Though he might pronounce differently if he were to see the rider in his present state, emaciated and weak, ever more prone to episodes of troubled breathing. It’s the lack of nourishment that will likely finish you.
But the prospect of fresh fruit or meat seems as distant as any army cookhouse, despite the rich smells that occasionally filter into their corrupted air from outside: aromas of cinnamon, lemon, turmeric, sweetly cooked lamb. Leaves from the Mulukhiyya plant, which Ingram explains is of the mint family. Lamb and mint sauce.
Now and then the rider will have dreams of Swann. The lance corporal assuming an ogreish ferocity in the most vivid of them, in which he will lunge like some cobra-tattooed troll from the granite underpinnings of a bridge, Bren in hand. Each waking leaving the rider freshly persuaded that the truth of a man is quickly outlived by the common interpretation of him. On one occasion he had constructed for himself an entire coda to the lance corporal’s story, the episode revisited so many times since – each time with such startling precision – that it would be hard now not to think of the fabrication as history. It will begin when the Italians come to the fallen citadel, determined to revenge themselves for the deserters’ raid. The episode at once becoming a bitter contest of attrition as the lance corporal hangs on to his defence, the palace grounds becoming strewn with the bodies of his besiegers. Until at last the engagement will see him retreated into the shelter of the grotto, breathless and bloodied, stubbornly defiant. Fucken bastards, tryin’ to move in on my Ritz! Try it now. Just fucken try!
And then that final irony: a scorpion sheltering beneath the kitbags, provoked into a strike by a sudden sl
ide of the lance corporal’s ankle. An ending that leaves him sickened with disappointment as he spends his last minutes laid paternally across the Bren, the pathways to his lungs gradually closing. A gross unfairness, perhaps, after so tenacious a display. Yet a conclusion possessing a certain poetry, decides the rider. A tailored justice.
But then in another imagining there is a different fate, which sees the same man in old age, whiling away the hours tending the plots of a modest homestead, his Senussi wife by his side. All alertness gone from him now, any quickness to temper.
The better version of him arrived at only in that second and greater life.
Both the rider and Ingram estimate it to be mid-August, marking the beginning of their second month in captivity together. But it’s hard to be certain, their attempts to maintain a calendar long since abandoned. An accurate logging of time would in any case be a route to despondency, and both of them prefer to think of a single day as being of indeterminate length, each man sleeping and waking according to his moods and patterns. A day might only be minutes. Or it might span a week or more. The world might entirely change in a day.
Ingram seems particularly proficient at diverting with stories and anecdotes, having at his command an enviable catalogue of them, and is apt to rouse himself now and then from his ghostlike state to regale the rider with legends of debauchment, ill discipline and other associated misdemeanours. ‘Did I tell you about the opium haul they found on the docks at Alex? The poor sod who lost an eye to a green parrot in a Clot Bey brothel? Did you hear about those halfwits who fished a croc out of the Nile at Giza? Of all the hare-brained ideas!’
On his own particular mishap and subsequent capture the major had always been less forthcoming, causing the rider to wonder if he had been another to arrange for himself his own retirement. ‘We were in support of the 22nd Armoured,’ had been the bones of it, ‘and the lot of us took a hellish beating at Knightsbridge. A hit from an AP round killed our driver, and the rest of us couldn’t blag a ride. Lasted a good while on foot before we had the idea of trying to make off with a Kraut truck. Bloody stupid idea. Went and got ourselves killed, didn’t we. What clowns!’
But the work, nonetheless, of dutiful soldiers, thinks the rider, if one were to accept the story as truth. ‘We were attacked by Senussi Arabs,’ he had narrated in turn. ‘We had an Italian prisoner. The same man whose letter we have. They were determined to hang him, and Corporal Swann and I wouldn’t stand for it. They had guns on us from a ridge so we had to find cover behind a few broken walls.’
‘Always the same with the wogs,’ had said the major. ‘Smiling one minute, then a knife between your shoulders the next.’
‘We held them off for as long as we could but our ammo was stored in a cave and we couldn’t reach it. I was going to make a run for it and hope they wouldn’t be quick enough to draw a bead, but one of them managed to put a bullet in our Italian. And that was the end of it.’
‘All over an Itie. You might have saved the ammo.’
‘He was our prisoner,’ the rider had reminded.
Leaving nothing further to add to it.
20
Despite any details of a forgotten life returned to him, the rider finds his best distraction in looking to the future, his fantasy of a journey home now so fully realised that it seems almost a foretelling rather than delusion. His departure from the village eliciting only a bemused apathy from his captors, his travel unimpeded this time by the harshness of the ground, so that he is brought without hindrance across the Akhdar range to overlook that familiar causeway. And how far now? Almost nothing compared to the miles so far covered. Already he finds himself marching the distance, gathering his breath as he walks, any breached lung tissue finally welded over, the blood strengthened. A man of new and stouter heart, bold and ready to flag down British soldiers when next they pass, eager to submit himself.
Where did you come from?
From unscouted desert, and then captivity. A rare tale!
And where are you headed for?
For home and a waiting wife.
To what reward?
To claim everything owed to us.
The fantasy from there leaping on to a rain-lashed village road leading to her house, his motorcycle sheeted over outside it. And once again that knock at her door, bringing her to her step. I’m sorry to trouble you . . .
Then afterwards? A rebuilt life, both of them winding back the years. A medical discharge from his regiment, with perhaps a teacher’s job to follow. History or music, either would suit. While the factory she works in might return in peace to the manufacture of automobile parts or farm machinery, allowing her to quit her place at the workbench to take up the duties of motherhood. A son, rendered for now in his own likeness, who will one day sit entranced at the feats of his father. An unlikely survival, a desert trek, an escape from captivity, the old injuries carried with pride.
The grand reinvention played out.
‘Tell me again how you met her,’ says Ingram from his pallet. ‘A motorcycle accident, you say?’
‘Yes, but the details are still . . .’
‘The gist of it, then.’
The rider measures out his words. ‘It happened outside her house. She came out to help. I think it had been raining. The front wheel went away from me in the wet. I trapped my leg under the exhaust. It left a burn just here, on my shin.’
Ingram nods. ‘And so she came out. And you saw her standing there, watching, in the rain.’ He takes a moment to process the image. ‘And what did you say to her?’
‘I said, I’m sorry to trouble you. But might you find the time for a rescue?’
Ingram grins. ‘So, an opportunistic bastard. Not to mention sly.’ His chuckle quickly becoming a splutter and then a series of hacking coughs. ‘You could read me your letter,’ he says, the rhythm of his breathing restored. ‘I know you’d rather not. But I’d be pleased to hear it.’
The rider moves reluctantly to his postbag and draws out a piece of paper, neatly folded. He lifts it into a shaft of light, taking a moment to scan the words. ‘It’s not necessarily final.’
‘Don’t worry, I shan’t be unkind.’
The rider clears his throat.
Dearest Nell,
I suppose by now you must have received news that I am reported missing. I can’t imagine what it must have been like to be told such a thing, and I can only hope that you managed to find the strength to weather it.
I am sure you are reading these words now and thinking that they are not in your husband’s hand, and that this must be an awful mistake. Or worse, some hateful prank. But I can assure you, my darling . . .
He falters on the open pronouncement of the word.
. . . that as of this date (which I believe to be in the month of August) I am alive and well and doing everything in my power to return home. I will not say exactly where I am, but I am away from battle and in no immediate danger, and my intent is to remain so until such time as I am able to secure my earliest passage home.
As to the reason for my awkward handwriting, I must confess to an accident some months ago, which caused a little stiffness in my hand.
He scrutinises the line, suddenly aware of a discrepancy in the looping of the ‘l’s and ‘f’s. His former pencraft returning?
Though you should not worry, as I am recovering well and show no sign of injury other than a little shortness of breath.
A quick glance towards Ingram, the major raised onto his side, his face defined in unfleshed bone.
I know this news will upset you, but we must try not to dwell on such difficulties and think ahead to this second chance. Although things may at first seem a little strange and different, you will have a husband again, and I think we can only be grateful . . .
He glances up to see Ingram’s expression, and stops reading. ‘You don’t approve?’
‘I said I shouldn’t be unkind.’
The rider folds away his letter, a little embarrassed. �
��Sorry to disappoint. Not lurid enough, perhaps.’
‘It’s a perfect letter . . . to a stranger. Can you not remember her at all?’
The rider looks away. ‘It’s been years.’
‘To hell with years. She’s your wife.’
‘There are pieces missing.’
‘Then we’ll pick them up for you, shall we? Scrape at the bones until we get to the meat. And then you can start again. You game for that?’
He waits for a nod of assent from the rider before relaxing back into the dark.
Despite the many noises and disturbances admitted through their thin prison walls, the rider finds that it is those imaginary sounds which intrude the most. The wail of a sandstorm, the thunder of distant guns, the sighing of a motorcycle whirling end over end, locked to the orbit of its own entropic axis. All too easy for him to pick out the roar of a bow wave, the grind of tracks over gravel, the swell and wash of fluids gathering in his own chest. And more troubling still, the intonation of his own confession, the inevitability of which he has become certain, despite his long-held and continuing abstention. Of course he has done his best to prepare for it, but how does one steel oneself against that which festers permanently beneath the skin?
Perhaps after all he had mistaken the nature of his injury. Memories not blown away, as the archdeacon had claimed, but obscured, covered over. That cloud of glass and silt thrown up by a somersaulting motorcycle entered into his head as the medium of disguise. The precious buried alongside the rejected, the dear along with the unconscionable. What’s needed is a more clinical approach.
And who better than the major to conduct it? An officer critical of ear and eye, a fellow quick to pass judgement. One might find the very same character on a review board or adjudicating at a court martial. An inquisitor to sit bolt upright and pierce the dark.
Tell me again about the letters, he might begin. How you came by them.
I retrieved them. From a stowage bin. On a burnt-out tank.
The Letter Bearer Page 17