The Penguin Book of First World War Stories

by None

  He chose to materialize one afternoon when her mother was out shopping and her father busy mowing the lawn. Dressed in his old army uniform with his decorations prominently displayed, he looked, he thought, rather handsome, distinguished, even a little dapper. No burglar or child-molester would affect such an elaborate disguise.

  ‘Hello,’ he said, standing in the open doorway of the living-room – an apt location for his first appearance, he thought.

  She looked up from the floor where she lay mutely mouthing the captions of a brightly coloured comic; studied him with interest and suspicion.

  ‘Who are you?’

  ‘I used to live here.’ He took a step into the room, closing the door behind him. ‘Just popped in to see what the old place looks like. What’s your name? Mine’s William. You can call me Billy.’

  ‘How did you get in? My mummy and daddy told me not to speak to strange men.’

  ‘I’m not a strange man. I told you, I used to live here. Do you want to play a game?’

  ‘What sort of game?’

  ‘I don’t know, you choose. How about hide-and-seek?’

  ‘My name’s Angela,’ she said. ‘I’m five.’

  ‘Hello, Angela.’

  ‘You look funny. Are you a soldier?’

  ‘Sort of, yes.’

  ‘Mr Green was a soldier. I know because he told me.’

  ‘Who’s Mr Green?’

  ‘The man in the sweet shop.’ Then, her suspicions aroused again, ‘If you used to live here you’d know that.’

  ‘I’ve been away a long time,’ he said. ‘In the army. Just got back. Mr Green didn’t work in the sweet shop when I lived here. There wasn’t a sweet shop.’

  They continued to talk. As he felt himself gaining her confidence he advanced slowly into the room, rediscovering the forgotten art of ambulation. With excessive caution he skirted those areas where the sunlight streaming through the french windows threatened to penetrate his disguise, expose him for the shadow he was. He rested against a mahogany table supporting an empty fruit bowl and a red ceramic vase. The polished surface of the table, he noted with the usual regret, disdained to return his reflection.

  ‘Do you have many friends, Angela?’

  ‘Hilary’s my friend. Her daddy’s a policeman.’

  ‘Can I be your friend, Angela?’

  He could only assume she was about to answer in the affirmative because at that moment the door he had closed behind him was flung briskly open–‘I’m back, Popsie!’– and the head of Angela’s mother thrust itself into the room. He evaporated instantly but with such precipitateness that the vase on the table against which he had been leaning was sent rocking on its base and crashing to the floor, fracturing into a dozen pieces. Angela’s mother turned to the noise with a start. She closed the door and threw it open again, repeating the experiment without success: the fruit bowl refused to budge. Puzzled, she knelt down and began gathering the shards of pottery from the floor.

  ‘It was the man.’

  ‘What man?’

  ‘The man who was here. The soldier. He made himself invisible when you came in.’

  ‘Come and help me unpack the shopping, there’s a good girl.’

  The next time he visited her he was more careful. Angela was in her bedroom feeding and dressing her dolls, her father in the garage tinkering with his car, her mother in the kitchen with her arms in a sinkful of grey suds – a conventional tripartition of roles he was pleased to see had survived the disastrous changes of modern life.

  ‘Hello, it’s me, Billy,’ he said, stepping out from behind the wardrobe with a nervous smile meant to deprive his sudden entrance of menace.

  She looked up from where she stood by a miniature crib in which a naked pink doll contentedly sucked air from the tiny plastic bottle nuzzled in its face. A slight furrowing of the brow and narrowing of the eyes betokened the tentative shaping of a question.

  ‘Are you a magician? I saw a magician on the telly once who could do that. He could make himself invisible. Pouf,’ she went, mimicking with ten tremulous fingers two rising balls of smoke.

  ‘That’s right, I’m a magician. I can do lots of tricks.’

  ‘Will you teach me them? I like tricks.’

  ‘Well, I don’t know, they’re secrets really. I’m not supposed to tell anyone.’

  ‘If you were my friend you’d tell me. Friends aren’t supposed to have secrets.’

  ‘Well, we’ll see, we’ll see. Perhaps when you’re a bit older.’

  ‘Grown-ups always say that,’ she complained. ‘My mummy and daddy don’t think you’re real. I told them about you but they don’t believe me. They think I made you up.’

  ‘You believe I’m real, don’t you?’– the note of anxiety in his voice betraying him.

  ‘Of course. I can see you, can’t I? And I can touch you if I want.’ She took a step towards him.

  ‘No, don’t do that!’ Backing away towards the wardrobe.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because, because I’m all dirty, my clothes are dirty. You don’t want to get your nice clean frock all dirty, do you?’

  ‘Why do you wear those funny army clothes? You don’t look like a proper soldier.’

  She was asking too many questions, it was time to leave.

  ‘Look, shall I do my trick again? Do you want to see me disappear?’

  She shrugged her shoulders. ‘If you want.’

  ‘All right, but this time you count to three, all right? Then say the magic word: Alacazam. Got it? Alacazam. Any time you want me to appear, just say the magic word.’

  She counted with ponderous deliberation. ‘Alka-seltz!’

  Running into the space he had vacated, she palpated the air with her fingers as if searching for a hidden crevice, then skipped back with a giggle to her dollies.

  Those were the happiest days of his death. He floated freely about the house, borne up by a sense of belonging once more to the land of the living, or if not quite belonging then at least being accepted as a sort of naturalized alien, or, more appropriately perhaps, a soldier on furlough, a prisoner on parole.

  His euphoria made him reckless. Sliding under the covers that night when he had assured himself she was asleep, he took it into his head to materialize. Using words like ‘materialize’, or for that matter ‘head’, in connection with what was at best an ethereal act is liable to be misleading. To materialize, in this context, simply meant that, had she opened her eyes, she would have seen him there beside her, or imagined she did. Unfortunately, this was precisely what happened. He evaporated before the shrill piping scream had time to leave her lungs, scrambling to the top of the wardrobe, curling into a ball, imploring her soundlessly, invisibly, to curb her cries, be quiet, he hadn’t meant any harm, he’d just wanted some company, that was all.

  ‘It was the man, the man,’ she gave out between huge gulping sobs, burying her face in her mother’s shoulder.

  ‘Ssh ssh, it was just a dream, darling, just a dream, Mummy’s here now, it’s all right, all right.’

  ‘He was in my bed, the man.’

  It irked him that she had reacted in this way. He’d been friendly, after all, he’d been nice to her, what was she afraid of? If only he could talk to her, explain, apologize, he’d never do it again, honestly, not if she didn’t want him to, cross his heart and hope to – well, never mind. But to appear before her now, he knew, would only make things worse, increase her fear, alienate her further. Especially as the so-called ‘dream’ in which he’d entered her bed was succeeded by a series of real (that is to say illusory) nightmares in which he apparently repeated and elaborated on the act. Night after night she would awake in a tangle of sweat-soaked sheets, screaming she’d seen him again. He came to despise this shadowy reflection of his already shadowy self, this impostor, this double, this malevolent twin, spreading a trail of terror and laying it at his door.

  There was nothing for it, he had to speak to her again. He waited till sh
e’d been tucked in and read to and was lying awake in the yellow glow of her bedside lamp, now left on all through the night, humming quietly to herself. She halted mid-phrase and looked up at him, lips parted in preparation for the automatic scream.

  ‘Don’t cry, Angela, please. I don’t want to hurt you, just be your friend.’

  ‘I don’t like you,’ she said uncertainly. ‘You’ve been scaring me. You’re not a nice man. I’m going to call my daddy.’

  ‘Don’t, Angela, please. Look, I promise I won’t visit you again if you don’t want me to. Just say so and I’ll go away, I promise.’

  ‘Go away!’ she said. ‘I don’t want to see you ever again.’

  He was beginning to lose patience with her. ‘Come on now, don’t be silly. Look, I told you I’m your friend, didn’t I? You can’t send me away, I’m your friend, for God’s sake!’

  ‘Mummy! Daddy! Mummee-ee!’

  In a fit of pique he swept a phosphorescent arm across the desktop cluttered with dolls and dolls’ clothing, dolls’ hairbrushes, dolls’ toys, dolls’ dolls, sent them clattering to the floor. ‘Play with these, don’t you? Bloody dolls! Just bits of plastic, dead bloody plastic! What about me, what about me?’ The momentum of his anger and frustration, suddenly finding a release after a deathtime of denial, proved impossible to contain. He charged through the room in a swirling vortical haze, upsetting the furniture, ripping the posters from the walls, lifting up a mirror and shattering it against the desk, stamping hysterically on the dolls that littered the floor at his feet, crushing their hollow unfeeling skulls, tearing them limb from limb, flinging the mutilated remains at the walls and windows, howling. He evaporated in a heap as the door flew open behind him.

  Everything was going wrong, why was everything going wrong? He hadn’t meant to fly off the handle like that, it just happened, ghosts had emotions too, he wasn’t perfect. And now he had spoiled everything, everything.

  He took once more to roaming the house without aim, borne down by the weight of his solitude and grief. When even movement proved beyond him, he would retire to a dusty corner of the attic or huddle in a foetal ball in the grate of an unlit fireplace, roasting in the cold ashes of self-pity and self-hate. How could he now enjoy watching over her through the night when aware that she might awake at any moment, denouncing him for dream crimes he had had no part in? How could he even enter her room when afraid that the icy draught he bore in his train might alert her to his presence, set into irresistible motion the whole familiar histrionic routine?

  Slouched one evening before the television set, watching a daft late-night horror movie with Angela’s parents, he heard them talking about him.

  ‘Poltergeist! So the place is haunted, is that it? Bloody ridiculous! What’s he want us to do, get in a priest to exorcize it?’

  ‘Please, darling, try and stay calm, I’m just telling you what he said, that’s all. Apparently it’s got nothing to do with ghosts, it’s quite a common phenomenon, especially among young girls. Some sort of release of psychic energy or something. They can break things, start fires, you know, cause a lot of damage.’

  ‘But Christ, Shirl, you saw that room. That wasn’t just breaking things. She must have done that physically, with her hands. But why, why?’

  ‘I know, I know, I’m just telling you what he said, that’s all.’

  How endearing the living were with their obstinate refusal to countenance any but the most grossly physical of explanations in their commerce with the spirit, how they feared the intangible, the unknown. Sometimes it seemed to him that for all the arid lunar emptiness of his own existence, the real tragedy was theirs. He at least knew how things stood, he had had time – so much time! – to adjust, while they still had to live through the monstrous metamorphosis of death, still had to suffer the pain of that fatal wrench. How differently they would treat their bodies, how they would glory and exult in the flesh, how plunder its pleasures, if they knew the hollow ache of facing eternity without it. How they will miss that heavenly machine when it gasps up its infernal ghost.

  Things had come to a head, they couldn’t go on as they were. It was clear their relationship was fractured beyond repair. It was equally clear that he couldn’t continue indefinitely in his present condition, slinking and skulking round the house, wilting under the burden of an oppressive guilt. He must appear before her one final time, explain what had happened, quietly, without rancour, obtain her forgiveness, then vanish for ever in the penetralia of the house till nature made them equal again.

  He selected for his day of valediction one sultry Sunday afternoon when both parents were in the garden sunbathing; prostrate, beach-clad, toning up their cancerous tans. It was too hot for Angela, who lay on her bed by an open window, listlessly turning the pages of a well-thumbed comic, sipping a glass of orange squash through two thin coloured straws.

  The main thing was not to frighten her. He materialized inside the wardrobe – less alarming, he thought, than suddenly appearing unannounced in the middle of the room – and pushed the door gently open with a sly forewarning creak. So innocent and incorruptible she looked, lying there in her red (what was it called?) jumpsuit on the bed. As cherubic as her name. He coughed to signal his presence and assumed a simpering, as he thought disarming, smile.

  Instantly she was up on the bed and backing away from him. Her lips parted, breaking not in a cry but in a thin gasp and bubble of saliva like one of the speech-bubbles in the comic she’d been reading.

  ‘It’s all right, Angela, it’s all right, I’ve come to say goodbye, don’t be frightened, please.’

  She had retreated dangerously close to the open window. In a single movement she turned on her heels, thrust her torso over the sill and split the air with a spirit-curdling scream. ‘Mummee-ee!’

  Her body was extended so far across the sill he was afraid the slightest movement would topple her, send her tumbling, plummeting to the patio below. He rushed towards her to prevent her fall, grab her ankles, hold her down, but even as his ghostly fingers grazed the fabric of her trouser-leg he knew he was too late, she had gone, overbalanced, was already somersaulting through the air like one of her own dolls, swooping to embrace the geometric grid of flagstones flying up to meet her. He could only look on with her parents in mute helpless horror as the implacable laws of gravity were fatally confirmed.

  He didn’t wait to see if she was dead. Dead or alive, what was the difference? Either way he had to leave. If alive, she would never want to see him again. If dead, he would be haunted by the ghost of her memory, by the permanent presence of her absence from the family where she belonged. The thought of all those unlived years, those untasted experiences, would pursue him like a life sentence, a death sentence, through eternity. Besides, how should he explain himself to her newly arrived spirit, how convince her of his thoughtless good intentions, how justify what he had done? No, the crime was clear, parole would be revoked, and escape was the only option. Shimmering through the open window and passing silently over the huddled scene of grief being played out below, he drifted sluggishly towards the whispering fens, then slowly up, up, up, like a child’s gas-filled balloon, on his way to heaven knows where.

  JULIAN BARNES

  EVERMORE

  All the time she carried them with her, in a bag knotted at the neck. She had bayoneted the polythene with a fork, so that condensation would not gather and begin to rot the frail card. She knew what happened when you covered seedlings in a flower-pot: damp came from nowhere to make its sudden climate. This had to be avoided. There had been so much wet back then, so much rain, churned mud and drowned horses. She did not mind it for herself. She minded it for them still, for all of them, back then.

  There were three postcards, the last he had sent. The earlier ones had been divided up, lost perhaps, but she had the last of them, his final evidence. On the day itself, she would unknot the bag and trace her eyes over the jerky pencilled address, the formal signature (initials and surname only),
the obedient crossings-out. For many years she had ached at what the cards did not say; but nowadays she found something in their official impassivity which seemed proper, even if not consoling.

  Of course she did not need actually to look at them, any more than she needed the photograph to recall his dark eyes, sticky-out ears, and the jaunty smile which agreed that the fun would be all over by Christmas. At any moment she could bring the three pieces of buff field-service card1 exactly to mind. The dates: Dec 24, Jan 11, Jan 17, written in his own hand, and confirmed by the postmark which added the years: 16, 17, 17. ‘NOTHING is to be written on this side except the date and signature of the sender. Sentences not required may be erased. If anything else is added the postcard will be destroyed.’ And then the brutal choices.

  He was quite well on each occasion. He had never been admitted into hospital. He was not being sent down to the base. He had received a letter of a certain date. A letter would follow at the first opportunity. He had not received no letter. All done with thick pencilled crossing-out and a single date. Then, beside the instruction Signature only, the last signal from her brother. S. Moss. A large looping S with a circling full stop after it. Then Moss, written without lifting from the card what she always imagined as a stub of pencil-end studiously licked.

  On the other side, their mother’s name – Mrs Moss, with a grand M and a short stabbing line beneath the rs–then the address. Another warning down the edge, this time in smaller letters. ‘The address only to be written on this side. If anything else is added, the postcard will be destroyed.’ But across the top of her second card, Sammy had written something, and it had not been destroyed. A neat line of ink without the rough loopiness of his pencilled signature: ‘50 yds from the Germans. Posted from Trench.’ In fifty years, one for each underlined yard, she had not come up with the answer. Why had he written it, why in ink, why had they allowed it? Sam was a cautious and responsible boy, especially towards their mother, and he would not have risked a worrying silence. But he had undeniably written these words. And in ink, too. Was it code for something else? A premonition of death? Except that Sam was not the sort to have premonitions. Perhaps it was simply excitement, a desire to impress. Look how close we are. 50 YDS from the Germans. Posted from Trench.