The Shell House

by Linda Newbery

  ‘Wars are made by men,’ Faith said. ‘And even floods and tornadoes might be, because of global warming. God chooses not to interfere.’

  ‘So he’s not good!’

  ‘No. Not because He’s not good. Because it’s in our best interests not to interfere.’

  ‘How can you say that? How could it be better to let the First World War happen than not? And the Holocaust—how could that be in anyone’s interests? And famines, and land-mines and the Twin Towers?’

  ‘We can’t know the reason for things like that. But God must have a reason.’

  ‘What, like you said he has for Michelle McAuliffe—for keeping her tied to a dialysis machine at the age of fifteen? Don’t tell me—it’s a punishment for something she did in a previous existence, right? Or what about him?’ Greg touched the EP initials above his head. ‘The baby, I mean, not our Edmund. Dying as a baby—what was that, a punishment for him, or for his parents, or for all of them?’

  ‘We can’t know. I don’t believe in that punishment-for-a-previous existence line. But there may be some good to come out of it. Michelle, say—she must be a different person because of her illness. She must affect people around her.’

  ‘But where’s the logic in that? If illness is so good for everyone, why aren’t we all ill?’

  ‘That’s stupid. If we were all ill, how would we appreciate health?’

  Greg threw out his hands in frustration. ‘That’s what gets me. It’s a circular argument, isn’t it? We don’t know why things happen, so we invent an omniscient God who does know, and because according to you he must be a good God, there must be a good reason for everything, however terrible. It’s an easy answer, too easy.’

  ‘We don’t invent God. He exists,’ Faith said passionately. ‘He exists. He sent His son to prove it. He’s in everything. In you and in me.’

  ‘Leave me out of it. I’m just a collection of cells. Think about it! The Earth is a tiny planet in a solar system somewhere in an immense universe that’s been here for billions of years. Jesus didn’t turn up till two thousand years ago. That’s a bit of a late entrance, the way I see it.’

  ‘So you do believe in Jesus?’

  ‘I suppose so. But only as far as there must have been someone by that name, who lived and died. But I also know there’s a couple of hundred billion stars in the Milky Way, and that’s only our own galaxy—it’s mind-boggling! What’s so special about this planet? It’s just a—a chunk of rock hurtling round a minor sun that’ll fizzle itself out in a few billion years. Why should God decide to send his son here?’

  ‘At least you’re prepared to have your mind boggled! That’s a start.’

  ‘OK, but it’s not a start in your direction. Why should God, if there was a God, think I’m important enough to bother with? I’m an insignificant speck—so are you.’

  ‘But don’t you see?’ Faith turned to him with missionary zeal. ‘You’re asking questions—you’re thinking about the reason for your existence! It’s a first step to faith. Doesn’t it occur to you that God has brought you to me, a believer, for that purpose? I don’t believe anything happens by chance.’

  ‘Oh. Right. God sees me wandering about aimlessly, and he thinks: “I know! I’ll introduce him to Faith. That’ll soon put him right.” What is he—a heavenly dating agency?’

  Faith laughed. ‘If you like.’

  He immediately wished he hadn’t said that, dating. It was all too obvious, wasn’t it? Faith thought she was going to turn him into a God-squaddie, so that he’d be an acceptable boyfriend—acceptable to her parents as well. No thanks.

  ‘You see yourself as my saviour, do you?’ he said, flippantly.

  ‘No.’ Her face became serious. ‘There’s only one Saviour.’ She touched the crucifix at her throat. ‘If you open your heart to him, He will show you His love and His truth. And that’s the only way it can happen. You can’t get there by reason, or logic, or arguing.’

  ‘But reason and logic are all there is. How can I know what I think otherwise?’ He got up and stood by the lakeside, looking out at the wind-ruffled water. It was hopeless, trying to have a sensible discussion with her. She twisted and turned everything to suit herself.

  ‘Reason and logic can get in the way,’ she insisted. ‘Trust your instinct. Your instinct is leading you towards God’s love. You can turn your back on me, but don’t turn it on God.’

  He wished she’d stop talking like Thought for the Day on the radio in the mornings. Any minute now she’d be inviting him to Sunday school. Why was it that the more scorn he poured on her arguments, the more she thought she was succeeding?

  ‘My instinct,’ he said, ‘is leading me towards the loo and a cup of coffee. And that’s all. I’m going back up.’

  Approaching the front, Edmund thought whimsically, was like reaching the seaside. The front line was a barrier more effective than coastline or cliffs. No-Man’s-Land was a dangerous channel; sentries were like coastguards, scanning the sea for invaders. The land beyond, German-held, was alien country. The analogy was reflected in C Company’s nicknames for the area: the irregular trench that fronted their sector was called the Golden Mile, a night show of Very lights or star shells was Blackpool Illuminations, and a sap that stretched out into No-Man’s-Land was known as Morecambe Pier.

  For now, the sector was fairly quiet. The 5th Epping Foresters were occupying a front-line position close to the Belgian border. It was rumoured that the next offensive would take place farther up, around the town of Ypres, where the bulge of the salient was surrounded on all sides by German-held ridges.

  ‘I want action,’ Alex grumbled. ‘All this waiting about is driving me mad.’

  ‘You’ll get action soon enough,’ said one of the other officers.

  Alex had been promoted to captain. Edmund watched him going about his duties with a mixture of admiration and envy. He was energetic, meticulous, leaving no detail unchecked; he was far more popular with the men than Edmund ever managed. As Alex moved among them, making sure their food had been served before eating his own meal, or checking sentry positions along the Golden Mile, he had the knack of making an easy joke or asking about a sweetheart or baby in a way the men obviously appreciated. Trying to copy, Edmund was unable to shake off his reserve, or a suspicion that the men laughed at him behind his back. It seemed to come naturally to Alex. When Wadey, a young lance-corporal, went into a shivering funk during a burst of shelling, Alex soothed and comforted him with a kindness that surprised Edmund; he could just as typically have reacted with scorn or impatience. Edmund was almost jealous.

  If Alex ever felt afraid, he did not show it. Edmund saw the gleam in his eye as he planned a forthcoming trench raid with Captain Greenaway in the officers’ dug-out over the remains of their supper. Talk of gun emplacements, sniper cover, box-barrages; games of tactics and daring; the company of other men—what more could Alex want? This was what he was good at; the war brought out his finest qualities.

  ‘If you were sent home on leave for a fortnight, this very minute,’ Edmund teased him when the discussion was over, ‘I believe you’d refuse to go.’

  ‘Home?’ Alex had hardly slept; he rubbed a hand across his eyes. ‘What is there for me to do at home other than fret to be back here? I haven’t got your rolling acres to wander in, or country house-parties for amusement.’

  Mid-February, and winter showed no sign of yielding to spring. The frost turned soil to concrete and breath to steam; it numbed fingers and noses and threatened toes with its bite. This was a mining area, bleak and industrial, the landscape pimpled with slag heaps and pocked with quarries. The scenery held little to attract the eye. Efforts were concentrated on strengthening the line: attempting to dig sumps, and carrying supplies of wire, duckboards and sandbags through the poorly-marked communication trenches. Through nights of intense cold this work progressed, not without casualties. It was said that the Germans knew the position not only of every road, but of every duckboard and walkway;
they picked out occasional victims with surgical accuracy.

  Almost nightly, patrols were going out into No-Man’s-Land to check the flanks of the sector and to find out whether a clump of bushes or a remnant of brickwork might conceal a machine-gun post. The barbed wire must be regularly repaired, a dangerous and time-consuming task. To his own surprise, Edmund was acquiring a reputation for recklessness; he was catching bravery from Alex. They volunteered for patrols, and sometimes made unauthorized forays beyond the wire. There was a thrill of bravado in leaving the cover of the trench, in being exposed to the night; in creeping, sometimes, close enough to the German trenches to hear snatches of conversations of which they might understand an occasional word. Once, as they returned from patrol, a rifle bullet passed so close that Edmund felt the rush of air on his cheek and heard it slam into the sandbags behind him. He felt light-headed, invulnerable. Hissing the password to the sentry, he slithered down into their trench, pulled Alex after him and helped him to his feet, laughing. Both of them were coal-streaked and filthy in the early grey light. For a wild moment Edmund thought: I have never been happier in my whole life. This is living in a way I have never dreamed.

  ‘Do you want to get yourselves killed?’ said the new junior officer, Paterson’s replacement.

  ‘Both or neither.’ Alex spoke into Edmund’s ear. ‘Both live or both die.’

  In daylight, all life was conducted below ground. The furtive creeping, head kept carefully below the dripping parapet, felt to Edmund like a literal enactment of the secrecy of his personal life. In the back-to-front world of the trenches, day was night and night was day. Daytime was for rest and sleeping, for brewing mugs of tea, for distributing mail and for writing letters. Night-time was for working-parties, and for vigilance, when the two armies, dug into opposing trenches, revealed their presence through desultory shelling, a sniper’s rifle, the rise and flare of Very lights. Humans needed to be as alert and cunning as foxes or rats.

  Edmund was in the officers’ dug-out, trying to sleep. Captain Greenaway was snoring, with a rasping intake of breath that strained Edmund’s nerves; Barnes, the other subaltern, was reading. Turning uncomfortably to face the shored-up wall, Edmund pulled his blanket over his ears. Alex was a few feet away on his own bunk, already unconscious, one arm flung loosely aside. Every time they settled to sleep, Edmund lay in a frustration of longing and desire. If Barnes as well as Greenaway had been soundly snoring, he would have risked crossing the few feet of clinker floor just to touch Alex’s trailing hand or gaze at his sleeping face. As it was, he had to make do with imagining. Closing his eyes, he thought of his lover’s body warm and close, the smell of his skin, the way his blue eyes looked vague when he woke, then sharpened into alertness. Edmund put the trodden coal-dust and the gas-curtain out of his mind to see instead the light-filled window of the Picardy farmhouse, the long dusks and dawns, the bare floorboards and simple furniture of their attic refuge. Here he was driven to distraction—they were so close and so apart. Is this love, he wondered, or is it madness? I am obsessed with him to a pitch of delirium. And then Alex would look at him in that fleeting, intimate way, or touch his hand, and he would be momentarily soothed until next time the fever burned him.

  Fully awake now, Edmund propped himself up, wound his scarf around his neck and pulled on woollen gloves. The dug-out was so cold that his breath clouded the air. He took a sheet of lined paper from his pocket and unfolded it to read the lines he had laboured over, peering in dim light. As this poem contained no declaration, it had been safe enough to show it to Alex while there were other officers nearby. Alex had read it carefully, twice, then nodded and smiled. ‘Yes, I like it. The second line’s a bit of a tongue-twister, but the whole thing—the horse, the man, the Christ-figure—it’s like a photograph.’

  Alex was never extravagant with praise, but Edmund knew that he would always be honest. Clutching a stub of pencil in his gloved hand, resting the page against his pocket notebook, he tried out variations of the awkward second line: Heaped shells perhaps . . . Heaped shells, and roofs caved in, and scattered tiles . . . that would keep the iambic rhythm, but would mean changing the next line, which would be a pity, as the grimness of the scene was in the littering of corpses along with other waste. Perhaps left wasn’t right: corpses strewn to grimace at the sky . . . corpses leer defiance at the sky . . . no, defiance wasn’t right at all . . . he muttered the phrases aloud, scribbled out, amended, and finally rewrote the line as it had been to start with.

  Barnes turned a page of his book; he had moved aside discreetly, hunching his shoulder. Hearing Edmund’s muttering, he probably thought he was praying aloud. Barnes always said the Lord’s Prayer to himself before sleeping, sometimes adding a few requests of his own. Touchingly simple-minded, Edmund thought.

  For A.C., he wrote on the back of the paper, then stopped. Always, he came up against the gulf between thought and expression, the unwillingness of words to group themselves for his purpose.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ Edmund asked, seeing Alex’s wincing expression as he got to his feet.

  ‘Galloping gut-rot. I’ve already been three times in the last hour—excuse me—’ Alex ducked through the gas-curtain; Edmund heard his feet hurrying away on the boards. He could sympathize, having suffered from diarrhoea himself more than once, as everyone did—it was an inevitable consequence of tainted water, dubious meat and the generally unhygienic conditions under which meals were prepared. The remedy was kaolin and morphine, a thick, chalky-tasting medicine.

  When Alex returned from the latrine trench, some ten minutes later, Edmund said: ‘You ought to go along to the MO. He’ll soon sort you out.’

  ‘With that foul kaolin stuff? I’d rather put up with it, thanks.’ Alex sat at the dug-out table and looked at the heap of papers that awaited his attention. Now that he was captain, he had endless reports to write and memos to send—on subjects ranging from casualty figures to the numbers of spare socks possessed by his company.

  It was only on a whim that Edmund went out on patrol that night.

  He did not have enough to do: merely giving cover to a wiring party that had gone off without incident. He stood motionless by the loophole, eyes straining, rifle aimed at the German lines, while Faulkner and his party fiddled with barbed wire. Afterwards, when they had crept back in, he felt restless. There was a thorny bush out in No-Man’s-Land, near a miners’ railway track, that he felt sure was used as a sniper’s post. There had been no sniper fire tonight—yet—but he wanted to investigate.

  Finding Alex on his way to battalion headquarters, Edmund told him he was going out.

  ‘I’ll wait,’ Alex said. ‘Take care. Don’t take risks.’

  As if he never took risks himself! Edmund thought. He crept forward along Morecambe Pier with Boyce behind. ‘Patrol going out,’ he told the sergeant on sentry duty, then led the way through the narrow, concealed gap. Spreadeagled, he and Boyce made their way across the treacherous expanse towards a huddle of bushes, negotiating an ice-glazed ditch, noting every dip that might offer cover. The ground was rough with shale under his hands and knees; a flare soared and flickered, momentarily lighting the bush Edmund had come out to investigate. His whole attention was focused on the line of rough grass that showed the position of the light railway track. It crossed his mind that a German patrol might be doing exactly the same thing; they could, all unknowing, be creeping towards each other in the darkness. Heart pumping, pistol at the ready, he crawled closer, discovering the bushes to be harmless, a gnarled cluster, smaller than they had looked through the periscope. No crouched figure, no rifle barrel.

  ‘Bit farther along,’ he whispered to Boyce. ‘There’s a ditch along the track—’

  At that moment the shelling started. Not only here—something was happening to the north, towards Ypres. Flares and alarm lights performed their eerie dance in the sky, with greenish flickers. The British guns were answering, raking the German front line. Looking to his left, Edmund pressed
himself close to the ground as a shell whined over to thud and splatter well behind their own front line. Time to get back in, he gestured to Boyce; the ditch could wait. Running in the darkness, then flattening themselves in the light of a new flare, they made their way, zigzagging shell-holes. He slithered into Morecambe Pier, and turned to make sure Boyce was behind him. ‘Well done, sir,’ said the sentry, ducking as earth and coal-dust showered them. ‘That was our back trench got hit just now.’

  Edmund nodded. Staring into the half-light he made his way along the sap to where he knew Alex would be waiting for him. The air was full of dust and the acrid smell of cordite. He wondered if anyone had the stove lit, for coffee.

  ‘Stretcher-bearer! Stretcher-bearer!’ someone was yelling.

  Alex was there by the periscope, still looking out to the German lines. Edmund touched his arm. ‘Alex? Nothing there, but we couldn’t stay around for a close look once the shelling started—’

  The head turned, and Edmund stepped back. It was not Alex but Willerby, a young lance-corporal—tall, skinny, hardly old enough to shave. ‘No, sir, it’s me. Captain Culworth wasn’t well—bad stomach cramp, he said. Told me to wait here in his place.’

  Edmund stared, heard the yell: ‘Stretcher-bearer! Now!’ and heavy footfalls. The latrine trench! He turned on his heel, slithering on the iced duckboard, and met Faulkner coming from the next bay.

  ‘Sorry, sir. Culworth’s been hit. Bad. I’ve sent a runner to Captain Greenaway.’

  But Alex is here. Where I left him. He said he’d wait. Blindly, Edmund followed Faulkner into the communication trench; saw the stretcher-party bent over their load. The man they were lifting to the stretcher was making terrible sounds—rasping moans, no strength to cry out. It can’t be Alex. I left him waiting for me. He must be there, waiting still —

  ‘Let me—’ Edmund’s voice was hoarse; he dropped to his knees. He saw Alex’s eyes wide open, unrecognizing; head arched back in a rictus of pain. ‘Alex! Alex! Where are you hurt?’ Alex opened his mouth but did not speak; he was breathing in short, painful gasps.