This mule today kicked a Private, then a Corporal, then a Sergeant, then a Second Lieutenant. I always stand well to the front!
Cheer-ho!
Patrick
March, 1917
She blinked away the image and stood half-paralysed by the same creeping unease which had squirmed inside her since their arrival in Ieper. It was like nausea, only warmer. She had felt it on the Ramparts, at the Flanders Museum, and now at the Cloth Hall, and it made her want to run away, to run and run and run. She had told Gavin about the squirmy feeling but he said that at only two months gone, nothing could possibly be moving yet, that she mustn’t get broody. She mustn’t.
“Kate!” He flapped his hand at her.
She steeled herself and crossed to the rectangular pond sunk into the stone. Its honour guard of thin water jets arched high and crystal cold into brilliant blue sky; she stood in front of them, trying to smile, but she could feel the gothic façade of the Cloth Hall pressing close behind her, its pointed churchy windows and gilded curlicues much too close and not how they should be. They were not right: too whole, too new, too clean. Where was the mist of dust which had thickened the air and lain fine in the creases of Patrick’s tunic? It had hung like a thin sepia veil over the ruins of the great hall in 1917, and again on the day they arrived in Ieper. She had seen it.
“What mist?” Gavin had said when she mentioned it. “The air is clear as a bell.”
Then she had known and understood; now she struggled to stand still for the photo. She wanted to run. She wanted to be sick.
“Say cheese, Kate! Smile a while!”
In a sudden light wind, the tall jets hunched over, shivered, and broke into icy rags and tatters. Bright water sprayed across her face, startling her into laughter. Gavin’s camera whirred happily.
“That’s more like it, Kate. You don’t laugh often enough. Not much at all these days.”
He slipped an arm round her as they walked away. “You have diamond droplets on your eyelashes.” He fished out a handkerchief and dabbed the spray from her eyes. “You’re the prettiest girl in town when you’re smiling and sparkly.” He drew her closer. She was embarrassed by a surge of relief at the return of tenderness. “By the end of next week it will all be over and everything back to normal.”
He was quietly insistent. All-be-over was scheduled for next Friday lunchtime, a quick and unremarkable medical procedure, but he did not trust her acquiescence. He did not want children; neither did she. But still he must constantly be reassured that she was going through with all-be-over; that they would continue with the life they had planned together, their cycle of travelling, meeting up with friends, lounging at their summer house in Eire, buying expensive items for their stately Victorian flat in Glasgow. The flat and its pale deep rugs and polished floors were his major arguments against children: imagine sticky fingers! Roller blades! The danger to the Rennie McIntosh glass! He laughed to prove the joke, but he meant it all, and watched her constantly, looking for changes in her, wordlessly demanding that she be as she had always been.
“You should have a special time next weekend,” he said, to reward her smiles. “What kind of pampering would you like?”
I would like, she thought, to be allowed to be a little affected by about-to-be-over, just a little; and I would like not to be affected by this place. But neither was likely and she could not share the unease with him.
They were still walking in the shadow of the hall, a shadow deep and dark, even on this bright day. The chill seeped up through the paving, wrapped round her and slid inside the collar of her jacket.
Mum, Patrick had written, Thanks for the scarf and mittens.
Just the ticket out here. The cold gets everywhere.
March, 1917
“You’ve gone quite pale,” he said.
“I’m cold.”
“There’s a café,” he said. “Let’s have a hot chocolate. Warm us up.”
She smelled the chocolate in the air, wafting round her face, warm and rich; she felt fingers of cold ruffle the hairs at the nape of her neck. She retched. Gavin let go of her suddenly.
“Morning sickness. You haven’t had that before,” he said accusingly.
“It’s the chocolate. The smell is over sweet.”
He swept her past the café. “I thought we’d agreed we’re not having any of that nonsense!”
But it wasn’t that nonsense, of course. It was something else entirely, something that only Great-Great-Auntie Rowan would understand.
Rowan lived in a white croft which dreamed by the side of the loch at Inverash. Kate visited her for a month every year in the summer holidays. There she could look up to the sky and study the frail white elegance of trailing clouds, and down at still water and see the pale shadows of sky; she could look into Rowan’s eyes and see traces of a blue clear as the summer loch, clouded now by great old age, and hear her say, “Patrick had the same blue eyes, like mine, like yours.”
As a child, Kate, standing on tiptoe, had puzzled over the old photographs ranged along the tall wooden mantelpiece, trying to see the blue. But the smiling boy in the stiff new uniform was a composition in shades of shadow; even the tartan trews and diced cap, which she knew to be bright coloured, were grey and greyish and darker grey. The eyes, though, had a curious lightness, and smiled mischief directly at her wherever she stood in the room. The other brothers, Alexander and Charlie, stared sightlessly into the distance, but Patrick sought her out. Even aged seven, she knew that Patrick knew her. And being only seven, she thought nothing of it; Rowan was comfortable with Patrick and Charlie and Alexander, and therefore so was she. She looked at their photos and their battered old school books. (“That’s a Latin grammar,” Rowan said of the one with the blue cloth cover and the gold stamp. “That was Patrick’s. He was clever. He was going to the University at Glasgow, but then the war came.”)
For years, Kate had thought the war ended in June 1917, because after that date, Rowan had nothing to say about it. But time was a confused concept at Inverash. Every Sunday afternoon, Rowan and she went to the rowan tree at the gate to polish the sixpenny pieces nailed to its bark. In June the blossom hung low in thick creamy clusters and, while Kate polished, Rowan used to pick some and thread it into Kate’s hair while she told the story of the sixpences as if for the first time.
“The boys carved their initials there before they went away. There, see? C. A. P., one on top of the other, 1914. And after Charlie and Alex were killed, and Patrick lost, all three in 1917, my father used to scrape the initials clean of lichen every now and then. Mother had a sixpence which Charlie had in his pocket when he was killed. It was new-minted, a 1917 coin, and somehow she could not bring herself to spend it. And whenever she got another 1917 sixpence, she could not spend that either, so she kept them in a jam-jar on the windowsill. And then one warm June night, two years after the war was over, she woke to find Father gone from the bed and heard banging and cursing. He was out at the gate in the moonlight with the jar of coins, a hammer, and long thin nails, and he was hammering sixpences into the initials to make them permanent. And with one bang he’d cry ‘My sons! My sons!’ and with the next a curse word, and the blossom, all ghostly white in the moonlight, showered from the tree and lay in his hair and round his feet. He hammered in a new date too: 1917. Mother was afraid that night, for he hammered like a devil in hell, he who had been a tower of strength, never shedding so much as a tear for his sons, but going about his business as usual, straight-backed and quiet-spoken. She brought him back to bed eventually and the floor and the quilt and the pillows were thick with the little flowers and their heady perfume. It was days before Mother was able to get all the blossom shaken out of the bedding, a week before the scent faded,’’ Rowan said.
And days before it faded from her hair too, Kate remembered. On Sunday nights, after the polishing, she always stood at the bedroom window, brushing the rowan flowers and pollen out of her hair. She looked out over the loch, bright
silver in moonlight, or black silk in the dark, and at the lacy silhouette of the rowan tree at the gate, to try and make out the sombre gleam of the initials of three boys, two dead and one lost. Sometimes “A” and “C” and “1914” were obscured by hanging flowers, but “P” and “1917” were further down the trunk and winked gently through the warm gloom.
Rowan often stood with her, checking that her hair was properly brushed and her teeth cleaned before bed, talking about the boys.
“What do you see out there?” she asked once.
“The tree and shiny sixpences.”
“Maybe if you look hard enough you’ll see the boys. They’re around here somewhere. Charlie and Alex at any rate. Where Patrick is, I cannot tell. He was lost. Missing in action, presumed killed.”
While Rowan talked, Kate listened to the quiet darkness, to the lap of the water on the shingle.
“They used to come tearing down the hillside, whooping like apaches, and run along the loch side, laughing. The sound carried for miles across the water – the minister used to say he could hear them in his wee white church on the other side. And when they got to the gate, they scuffled to get in first, leap up, and smack the branches of the tree. Such a sight they were, elbowing one another out of the way. It still makes me laugh.”
Kate was a teenager before she realized that Rowan could never have seen the boys playing since she was born long after they were killed. “That’s right,” Rowan agreed. “I was the result of the night Father hammered in the sixpences, which is how I got my name. I was either Rowan or Despair, my mother always said. Rowan was prettier.” She stirred the tea in her cup and smiled. “But all the same, I’ve heard Charlie and Alex laughing. I’ve seen them often too, tearing down the hillside. I still do. Never Patrick though.”
The verdict of the family was that Rowan was a little crazy but harmless, contaminated by the grief of her parents and thinking their memories her own. Kate never argued the point but she knew Rowan wasn’t crazy. On warm summer nights when the loch was a black disc with a yellow moon floating in it, she too sometimes heard the thud of running feet and the silvery giggles of young boys, very faint, as if coming from a long way off. It might have been a dream, or the effect of Rowan’s talk, but Kate thought time had no meaning here, for it overlapped and sprawled backwards and sideways and didn’t know that its proper place was marching forward in a straight line.
Gavin enjoyed being a celebrity, which was why they ate at Café Franz each night. They had been identified as the relatives of the soldier brought in from the cold after ninety years missing; this fact conferred a certain status among the habitués of the Armistice Day ceremonies. Café Franz was the haunt of the British who came with little wooden crosses and poppies and wreaths as gifts for the dead they had come to visit. They huddled round the red-and-white checked tablecloths which covered small round tables, removed their Aran sweaters when the room warmed up, and did their best to relive the Great War. Kate loathed it all.
From floor to ceiling the walls of the café were hung with ancient photographs of smiling boys in khaki and grim-faced men in khaki; worst were the ones, men and boys, who tried to smile beneath their haunted eyes. In khaki. In puttees. In kilts. In British Warms. Even in turbans. Then there were the photos of the gassed, the wounded, the shell-shocked, in trenches, in casualty stations, in ambulances, on trains. Their dead eyes gazed palely down at the company gathered in their honour. Kate could not meet that gaze and fiddled with her knife and fork while Gavin told yet again the story of Patrick’s reappearance: the man digging up his garden to make a patio; the sudden summer storm which raged all night; the heavy clay soil which shifted and heaved and thrust up the detritus of war: the bullet casings, a tin cup, a toothbrush, a thin white bone which turned out to be a finger beckoning (how Gavin enjoyed telling that, his hand raised, his finger curled in a summons), a hand emerging, an arm extending, stretching, reaching . . .
“Every year it happens,” the man in the Manchester United T-shirt said. “The earth pushes them up and we bring them in from the cold.” He drained his pint. “They want to be found.”
Gavin nodded. “Yes. Patrick came to the surface on the anniversary of the day he was killed – the seventh of September 1917.”
There was a moment’s respectful silence and then the Man U fan raised his glass. “And now he’ll have a proper burial. Peace at last. Here’s to Patrick.”
Glasses were drained all round the café. Peace, Kate thought bitterly. Why would Patrick be any more at peace in the little white coffin in Ramparts Cemetery than he had been happed up in the clay in someone’s back garden? He had never been at peace; the earth hadn’t pushed him up – he had struggled out of his muddy shroud and brought her here to Ieper.
She toyed with her mineral water. No wine for a pregnant lady, as if it mattered. But the leaflets from the doctor’s surgery had been quite definite – no alcohol. It was odd how authoritative a leaflet could be, even to a soon-to-be-over pregnant lady.
“. . . They are all around here. You can feel them. I like to think they know we’re here, that they’re not forgotten.” It was the man from Newcastle speaking. He had a tendency to sentimentalize. “There are times I think of my young great-grandfather, who never lived to see his son. The week before he was born, great-granny woke screaming and saw her husband at the foot of the bed. He appeared out of a stinking brown mist – we reckon that was the mist of cordite and explosives that hung over the Somme valley – and there was a great hole in his chest all gushing with blood. Ghastly pale he was and he leaned forward as if to touch her belly and cried, ‘Christ! I wish I’d seen that bairn!’ and then disappeared.”
And, of course, Kate thought, it turned out that he had been killed – shot in the chest – on the very night he appeared to his wife. All their stories ended like that – with a supernatural punchline, the resolution of longing in a spectral return home.
“And often I wish that I could see him, that one time I’ll turn a corner and there he’ll be.”
Oh, you wouldn’t like it if he was, she thought silently.
“Imagine being able to talk to him,” Newcastle said wonderingly, “and to ask him what it was really like.”
“I don’t suppose you’d have much to say to one another after all these years!”
She hadn’t meant to speak aloud, or so sharply, but the words rose up and out like fizz. Fear, she realized, had the qualities of champagne.
The big man continued as if she hadn’t spoken. “He’d want to know about the bairn, of course,” he said. “And all the other bairns that came after.”
It is spring at last, Mum and Dad, even in this place. Imagine my surprise to see bare blasted trees putting out little green buds; and there’s a blackbird nesting not twenty yards from where we are entrenched. I hear her every morning, whistling with the important business of sitting on her eggs while the big guns boom with the important business of destruction. Corporal Mackenzie died this morning. A sniper shot. He lived for a few minutes after he fell but did not have much pain. He lay looking up at the sky. “It’s spring,” he said, surprised. The blackbird was singing and I thought what a hard thing it was to die listening to the happy burbling of the wild birds.
We said a prayer over him and then made tea. The edge was off the wind and the earth warm and stirring. Soon we were laughing and joking. What a force life is, even out here. But my head is full of thoughts which there is not time to write. When I come home, then we’ll talk.
Cheer-ho!
Patrick
May, 1917
Suddenly things were unbearable. The stony faces on the walls frowned down at her; Newcastle, who was after all a civil soul, drifted into a reverie; Gavin was trying to catch her eye. She got to her feet and retreated through the door that led into the courtyard where the toilets were. The last of the autumn leaves were thick on the cobbles and crunchy underfoot. She scuffed through them, then was irritated when a gust of wind snatched them u
p and threw them prickling against her legs. The wind blew from the road that led to the Lille Gate and past the moat which enclosed Ramparts Cemetery, where Patrick would lie. She had first seen the place from the other side of the moat: from a distance, the creamy headstones, stalwart on thick green lawn, looked like a stubby little village huddling under the trees. At Gavin’s insistence they had crossed to go in and she had posed for a photo at the foot of the Cross of Sacrifice. The air was sharp with chrysanthemum scent which rose like thin smoke from the ragged clumps planted at each grave; sombre in their funeral purples and golds, the flowers sighed out the bitterness of the dying days of autumn and the finish of things. Patrick’s grave was open and ready to receive him. And she was here to learn at last what he wanted.
The nights at Inverash were full of sound: the water lapped and the trees sighed and the owl in the woods to the rear of the house hooted mournfully. There were whispers too, boys’ whispers, as they slipped out of the back door and into the woods, looking for badgers, or going down to swim in the dark, which was strictly forbidden but Mum and Dad slept deeply. Rowan was always pleased when Kate told her she’d heard them, and disappointed when Kate was sure there were only two.
They used to sit in the evening and read the letters, which were carefully stored in a square metal biscuit tin. Charlie’s and Alex’s were short, hoping everyone was as well at home as they were in France and Flanders, and please to send some tobacco; but Patrick, the clever one, wrote often and at length:
The Mammoth Book of Ghost Stories by Women (Mammoth Books) Page 28