Gifts of War

by Mackenzie Ford

  “I found it in a bookshop, framed. It shows the Amazon and the Orinoco, but it was made in the sixteenth century, before the course of the rivers was fully known.”

  “Hal, what a wonderful idea.”

  “I thought you could start collecting—maps, I mean. It’s travel of a kind. Something you can do while the war is on.”

  “Of course, of course. Hal, you are thoughtful.” She raised herself onto her knees and kissed my cheek.

  I took from the bag some metal tumblers I’d borrowed from the Lamb. Then, with a flourish, I took out a bottle of champagne that I’d persuaded the barman at the Crown in Stratford to part with.

  “Voilà!”

  The tumblers sparkled in the evening sun and Will tried uncertainly to focus on one, his eyes big and round.

  “How do you feel about tomorrow?” I said, offering Sam some champagne. She set down the map and took the tumbler.

  “Nervous, of course.” She swallowed.

  “You like it here, but you’re unsettled?”

  She nodded. “You know how I feel. You know so much already.” She brushed Will’s cheek. “You’ve unsettled me even more.”

  A shout went up as a wicket fell.

  “Sam, a lot’s happened to me in the past few days, more than I dreamed possible. There’s something I must say and I must say it tonight.”

  She eyed me. “You’re not going too fast, are you?” She bit her lip.

  “I have no choice,” I said. “You’ll understand when I tell you.”

  She picked up Will and hugged him to her.

  My heart was racing. This time it was me who was fired up. This moment, this picnic of sorts on the cricket field, this pastoral English scene, this slow, beautiful green-and-white world, was important to me, but for now I put it to one side. I could hear my pulse throbbing in my ears. My throat was dry. Would I be able to get the words out, the words that I planned to say? I felt like I’d felt at school when I was waiting for the results of an exam.

  “As of now, there are two things you don’t know about me—two important things anyway, two relevant things.” I smiled and laid a hand on Sam’s knee, where she was half-sitting, half-kneeling and hugging Will. “First, when I was wounded in Flanders, my prostate gland was hit and in such a way that it is beyond repair.” I paused. “I can never have children.” I waited, to let that sink in.

  A shout as another wicket fell.

  “Second, today, this very morning, I was offered a job, a new job, a good job, a fantastic opportunity. As an intelligence analyst at the War Ministry in London.” I paused again. I was in a rush but I wanted Sam to assimilate these two bits of news.

  “If the board goes against you tomorrow, why don’t you move to London and live with me? I know you don’t love me but I don’t mind. I have come to adore you and maybe, over time, you could learn to love me. We can get married, or let people think we are married, which ever you prefer. We can raise Will as ‘our’ son, even have him christened. You could get a job as a teacher in London. You say you are unsettled, want to be more useful. Come to London, give it a chance.”

  I let Will curl the minuscule fingers of his hand round one of my thumbs.

  “Of course, it would mean … giving up on Wilhelm. It would mean hiding the truth from Will, certainly for now, maybe forever. But if you’re unsure, we could try it, not get married immediately. We’d have to pretend, of course. No landlord would rent us anything, anywhere, if they thought we were living in sin. But, if we did that, you could wait… see how the war turns out, how long it lasts, what sort of peace there is afterward. It wouldn’t be an ideal life but it might be the best, from Will’s point of view. He’d have a father, a man to model himself on. I’d look after you—financially, I mean. My family has enough. More than enough.”

  She didn’t say anything, just hugged Will to her.

  “It’s a good job I’ve been offered,” I added after a moment. “Using my German, analyzing intelligence reports. I’ll be nearer the center of things. Useful.”

  She looked away, then turned back.

  “You’d do this for me?”

  “I’m doing this for me, too. In a way, I’m trapped—trapped in my medical… condition, predicament, ailment, call it what you will. You’re trapped too, I think. In a different way, of course, but you don’t… you can’t… you know what I mean.” I stroked her knee again. “I know it hasn’t been long that we’ve known each other, but I adore you.”

  She kissed Will’s hair. “We’d need to live in London?”

  “Yes. Not as safe as here, I know, but more interesting.”

  Another shout as another wicket fell.

  “And you’re going to take the job anyway?”

  “Yes. I can’t turn it down. It’s … it’s a second chance for me to be useful in the war. You can see that.”

  Will was growing sleepy and she wrapped him more tightly in his shawl.

  “It’s fast, isn’t it?” The expression on her face was serious. “It’s what—less than a month since our walk by the river in Stratford.”

  I said nothing.

  Out of the corner of my eye I saw a cricketer running in our direction. The ball had been hit toward us. He picked it up and threw it back to the wicketkeeper.

  “I’m touched by your offer, Hal. Very. But… the fact that you made it seems to suggest that I’m going to lose tomorrow. Do you know something I don’t?”

  I shook my head. I wasn’t going to mention the gesture I’d seen the headmaster make on my first visit to the Lamb, when he had drawn his finger across his throat. “No, not at all, I swear. It all fell into place for me today, after the job offer. That’s why I’ve splashed out on champagne. Also, I had dinner with my sister in Stratford some time ago. She’s a nurse in London and just off to France. She helped me to see that I can’t stay here. My wounds are as mended as they are ever going to be and… a job in the War Ministry… I can’t say no.”

  Another commotion and the players began to leave the field. One side was all out.

  Will was now fast asleep, his mouth wide open in exhaustion. I was growing fond of him.

  “I don’t know what to say,” she breathed. “Until a moment ago, all I could think of was the school board. Now you throw in London, intelligence, raising Will as one thing when he’s another. Marriage even.” She waved her free arm, the one that wasn’t cradling Will. “Good-bye to all this.”

  I still didn’t speak. Someone was using a roller on the wicket.

  Sam shook her head. “I can’t give you an answer now. I told you my life is a mess, you’ve unsettled me even more, and now I’m more confused than ever. Having Will in the way that I did… it wasn’t easy. If I lived with you, shared a flat or a house, pretending to be married … what kind of life is that? What would my sisters think? What would my mother have thought? She’d have said… it was sinning twice over.” She shook her head. “The worst thing is—I don’t know when I can give you an answer. Wilhelm came into my life suddenly, then disappeared just as suddenly. You look like you’re doing the same.”

  Two other spectators, walking the boundary of the field between innings, went by. I nodded to them but they glared back at me. As they moved on, I heard the word “bastard” used. So did Sam.

  She gasped and pulled Will closer to her. She raised her head and looked me square in the eye. “I don’t love you, Hal, not now anyway.”

  I took her hand and kissed it. “The offer still stands.”

  She picked up the map and held it and Will close to her.

  “Take me home,” she whispered. “I need to be alone.”

  And so we packed away our things and trudged back around the edge of the field. She stopped at the kissing gate and turned toward me. “Remember the gate by the river at Stratford? That’s where Wilhelm asked me to marry him. He was enchanted by kissing gates— they don’t have them in Germany. He slid the gate across, so he had me trapped. He said he wouldn’t let me go until I gave
him an answer.”

  She smiled—a sad smile, I thought—then turned again and led the way over the narrow bridge across the stream into the church graveyard. In silence, we made our way back to the lockkeeper’s cottage.

  That night I didn’t sleep, even though I stayed up drinking in the Lamb with the cricketers after the game in the hope that the alcohol would tire me out. Apart from the cricket, people talked about the school board meeting the next day, though some of the regulars had observed that I had befriended Sam and didn’t bother to ask me whose side I was on. I went to bed at about a quarter to midnight and fidgeted my way through to two-thirty, when I finally dropped off.

  I was awake again at five. I lay in bed reading, got up at six, and went for a walk along the railway line, to think. So long as I didn’t push myself, my leg now gave little trouble. What would I do if Sam said no? I’d known her for only a few weeks, though it had been months since I first saw her photograph. She couldn’t blow such a hole in my life in such a short time, surely? A German bullet had had a pretty permanent effect, and that had taken an instant, but that was different, wasn’t it? I wasn’t sure my analogy worked.

  She was still in love with Wilhelm; that much was very clear. I had to be prepared for the worst.

  What had happened to Wilhelm? Had as much happened to him as had happened to me? Was he still alive, had he been injured, had he been invalided home, found another girl maybe, another woman, was he perhaps a father twice over? I had met him for only a few moments, but I knew that if he was still alive, he would be faithful to Sam. We were opponents, rivals, in two senses now, he and I, but I still couldn’t dislike him.

  I returned to the Lamb, bathed and shaved and had my breakfast. I was at the station by seven forty-five, half an hour before the first Stratford train. I still didn’t have enough petrol to use my bike.

  Strictly speaking, I didn’t need to go to Stratford, not to the Ag anyway. But I wanted to escape Middle Hill on this day of all days, when the hated board would be meeting. If I stayed, I knew that the hours would drag. At the same time, there were good-byes I wanted to make in Stratford, minor debts to clear up, the library book I had lent Sam to be returned.

  Tonight would be my last night at the Lamb. I had decided to go to London straightaway, the very next day. It would give me more time to find a suitable hotel and I thought I would have a very short holiday in the capital, which I didn’t know at all well. If I was going to be as overworked as Colonel Pritchard threatened, this might be my only chance for a while to see the sights, catch some theater, visit some seedy nightclubs, do a few exhibitions—all the things Izzy seemed so at home with. I should have gone to London via home, of course, to see my mother, as I had promised Izzy, but I knew that I couldn’t just drop in on my parents for an hour or two. Better to steer clear for the moment.

  At around eight the platform started to fill up. I nodded to the few villagers I recognized. I looked at the station more carefully than usual, now that this was my next to last morning. How would I think about Middle Hill in the future? There was a fine layer of soot on most surfaces. Was the whole countryside hereabouts being dusted in the same way? Not quite as bad as Birmingham.

  The signal clanged down, in its gantry along the platform, and I looked toward it.

  I saw Sam.

  What on earth was she doing here?

  She saw me and ran toward me. She stopped in front of me. She looked flustered and for once she wasn’t wearing an Alice band. Her hair fell loose on her shoulders. I liked it. There was no sign of Will.

  “I called in at the Lamb.” She was breathing heavily. “They said you were here.” Her skin was flushed. “I had to catch you, before—” She broke off. “That meant running—so I left Will with the landlord’s wife.” She grinned. “Neither of them likes the arrangement.”

  I smiled but said nothing.

  She drew me to the edge of the platform, near where the signal gantry was located.

  “I haven’t slept,” she said in a half whisper and, now that I looked closely, I could see that there were sallow patches around her eyes.

  “I’ve been up since five,” I said.

  “But I’ve made a decision.”

  The gantry creaked as the second signal clanged down. The train was nearby.

  “You don’t waste your time.”

  “That’s because … if I were to take your offer … I couldn’t do it after being dismissed by the board.”

  I frowned. “Why not?”

  “It wouldn’t be fair on you.” She shook her head so that her hair was flicked off her face. “It would mean that I was just using you because some other course of action had failed.”

  “Maybe you see it that way, but I don’t mind.”

  “I do mind.”

  I could hear the train in the distance. “So what are you saying?”

  “I’m saying that—”

  The train whistled.

  “I’m saying that if I agree to your proposal… to your suggestion, I must do so not because I have failed at something, or been rejected by a board, but because I want to be with you.”

  The train was almost at the platform. I never took my eyes off Sam’s face, but I could hear the squeal of the wheels, the hiss of escaping steam. The other passengers on the platform picked up their cases and bags.

  “Go on.”

  She made a face, as if I were as young as Will. “You are a good man, Hal. Very good. And you are good for me. I said last night that I don’t love you, and that’s true. For now it’s true anyway. But you’re … I like being with you, I can talk to you, I like touching you, feeling you’re there. Will’s calmer, too, when you’re around. You couldn’t know that.”

  We were suddenly engulfed in steam. Everyone and everything else disappeared for a moment. I was reminded of what Sam had said about the mist on the canal, the night Will was conceived.

  The steam cleared.

  “I can’t marry you, Hal. That wouldn’t be right. Maybe… if I grow to love you … as I hope I can … then we’ll see. But we’ll have to pretend to be married. I don’t know what I’m going to tell my sisters but I’ve had enough of the way people look at me in the village, and the way they look at Will, calling him… names … as if he’s done anything wrong. At least in London we’ll be more anonymous, people won’t have to know… we can get on with living our lives.”

  She bit her lip. “If you can accept that, if you don’t think I am using you, and if your offer still stands, I accept. But I’m not going to wait for that board to dismiss me. If your offer still stands, let’s act on it straightaway. We can make a start for London right away; today, I mean.”

  She reached out and her hand touched mine. “I’ll tell the school I’m resigning. The board can go … they can …” She grinned again. “I really don’t care what they do.”

  NORTHUMBERLAND AVENUE, WHEN I FOUND IT, was gloomy beyond belief. I mean the street itself. It led from Trafalgar Square to the Thames but was lined with vast stone-faced office buildings. And I mean the ministry too, or that part of the ministry that was housed there. At first, I thought I had made a mistake, swapping the tranquil, provincial landscape of Stratford for a metropolitan warren that made the Ag seem like the latest word in modern architecture. My sister had misled me.

  Things didn’t improve much when, eventually, and with some difficulty, I located Pritchard. It must have taken forty minutes and three different escorts (all in uniform, with medals, all missing an arm or a hand) before I was shown into his office, at the back of the building on the third floor, across a small, stone-flagged courtyard. His was a windowless room containing two desks, though the other appeared unmanned for the present. At any rate there were no papers on it, no pencils, no cup for tea or coffee, no ashtray, no photographs of husband or wife, children or dogs. It was as barren as no-man’s-land.

  “There you are,” he growled, scrambling to his feet. “No saluting here, by the way,” he added as I raised my
arm. “We don’t go in for it in intelligence. Here, I have some papers for you to sign, confirming your appointment and your promotion. And the Official Secrets Act.”

  He laid them on his desk and I signed without reading them.

  “Have a seat there,” he said. “I’ll brief you and then take you through to where you’ll be working. Find a hotel all right?”

  I nodded. “In Bayswater.”

  “Good,” he said, lighting his pipe. He wasn’t interested in where I lived. That suited me. Sam was looking for a flat.

  I, of course, had been pleased—more than pleased, delirious, overwhelmed—that she had agreed to head south with me, right there and then, at Middle Hill station. She and I had had a good first weekend in London, even though it had meant lugging Will around the sights—Buckingham Palace, Parliament, the British Museum. But we’d found a cheap and cheerful restaurant near the hotel, where they made a fuss over Will and where a large Saint Bernard kept an eye on the proceedings. Will liked dogs.

  “Okay,” said Pritchard, once his pipe was safely alight. “For the first few weeks, at any rate, you’re going to be doing some fairly routine stuff. Reading newspapers mainly—German newspapers that our agents have picked up, either inside Germany itself, and have smuggled out, or in Switzerland or Norway, and have shipped back here.” He wiped his pipe with his handkerchief. “The papers are out of date, of course—maybe as much as three weeks out of date. But we’re not looking for obvious secrets; the Germans have censorship just as we do, so it’s unlikely anything obvious would slip through. No, I want you to read the papers in an oblique way, so to speak, to see whether the overall thrust of articles tells you anything about, say, German morale, general population movements, weaknesses or worries the population might have that we could use in propaganda. As days and weeks go by, you might notice changes in news coverage, and that might tell us something. It’s thin, I know, but it’s a useful way of starting, so we can double-check that you have the cast of mind we are looking for. And you’ll learn, of course, from others who’ve been at this for months already.”