The Grass Memorial

by Sarah Harrison

  She sat, too, in an attitude that was robustly practical rather than ladylike: crouching, but with one leg extended to the side to accommodate her thickening belly. The extended leg was visible almost to the knee, wearing a red and black patterned stocking and a heavy, mud-encrusted black boot. Harry had never seen such a thing outside the theatre and to encounter it here, in the drizzle of this hilltop churchyard, had a dizzying effect that made him catch his breath.

  She worked away unselfconsciously, occasionally shifting to the side to get to a fresh patch of earth. She did this unceremoniously, putting one hand on the ground, gripping the folds of her skirt in the other and performing a little hitching motion, accompanied by a small but audible grunt of effort.

  Darby nodded his head glumly at the rain and the sound of the bridle made her look round. She seemed not in the least suprised to see him.

  ‘Harry, it’s you.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I didn’t mean to spy.’

  He dismounted and dropped the rein over Darby’s head. She rose heavily to her feet and rubbed her hands, first one against the other and then on her cloak. They were still muddy, there was no question of kissing either of them, so he gave what he felt to be a rather ridiculous little bow. ‘I’ve only been here a matter of seconds.’

  ‘I think you can be forgiven. I can see that I’m a spectacle.’ This was said with no note of apology, and even the hint of a smile. ‘How are you, Harry?’

  ‘Well. I hope you don’t mind – that I’m not intruding? Jeavons said you had walked here.’

  ‘Yes, he did very politely try to dissuade me, but I like to walk.’

  ‘You’re in good health.’ It was half statement, half polite enquiry.

  ‘Perfect.’ She indicated the grave. ‘I’m trying to make Hugo’s last resting place a little less austere. But that’s really only an excuse. I like to come up here and grub about, and be with him. It’s companionable.’

  ‘Am I intruding?’

  ‘Harry . . .’ She tilted her head, gently admonishing. ‘It’s a great pleasure to see you, especially as I know you’re leaving soon. Oh!’ She wrapped her cloak around her as the rain intensified. ‘Shall we seek sanctuary for a moment?’

  Harry left Darby at the entrance to the porch and they went in. On this overcast morning it was dim inside the church, and the rain rattled like shot on the windows. She took off her cloak and spread it over the back of one pew, then went to sit in the pew in front, where he joined her. His senses were overwhelmed by her proximity, and the peculiar sense of intimacy conferred by these surroundings. Her dirty hands, her disordered hair, the moisture on her face and the mud on her boots and clothes, all these he found almost unbearably seductive. He had never before seen her other than armoured in her customary restrained and unshowy elegance, so that though she was wearing more and heavier clothes than usual it was something like seeing her without clothing at all.

  But if Harry was unsettled, Rachel had never seemed more at ease.

  ‘This is where we were married,’ she said softly, gazing around as if reminding herself. ‘Do you remember our wedding?’

  ‘How could I forget? It was a great day. I’d never seen Hugo so happy.’

  She looked at him. ‘He was solemn. So very solemn, when I walked up here to stand next to him.’

  ‘That was the measure of his happiness.’

  ‘Yes, I believe that too. I never knew anyone as carefree as Hugo, but on our wedding day he was . . .’ she sought the word ‘. . . careful.’

  All the time she was speaking she had been rubbing her wedding ring with her thumb, so that now the gold stood out bright on her mud-stained hand. Harry would have liked more than anything to take the hand in his, but instead he said: ‘He loved you more than he ever thought he was capable of loving. He was in awe of his own feelings.’

  ‘I was fortunate,’ she said, unaware that he was talking of himself, ‘the most fortunate woman in the world. I often think of all the bright and beautiful young hearts that must have been broken when this thin, plain old widow came along and ensnared their Hugo with her witchlike wiles.’

  She was only half joking, and now unthinkingly he laid his hand on hers. ‘You are none of those things.’

  She smiled. ‘Certainly not thin . . .’

  ‘And he was never in love until he met you. If there were girls who thought otherwise, then they were mistaken.’

  ‘That’s a comfort.’ Her manner changed, became more lighthearted, so that although there was no suggestion that he do so, he removed his hand from hers. ‘And what about you, Harry?’ she asked. ‘Is there some lovely creature in London who will be pining for you when you go to war?’

  ‘No.’ He tried to fall in with her manner. ‘Not unless there is someone who has successfully kept her feelings from me.’

  ‘You must write to us if you can.’

  ‘Of course!’ He was eager. ‘As often as it’s possible.’

  She stood up and he followed suit, stepping out of the pew to let her go first. It had stopped raining, but in the porch the flagstones were wet and littered with leaves and twigs blown in from the churchyard. Darby stood with his head and shoulders under cover and Rachel went over to him and patted his neck. She didn’t look at Harry when she said: ‘You’re taking Piper with you.’

  ‘If I may?’

  ‘Of course. He should be ridden, whatever the circumstances, and who better to ride him than you?’

  ‘It won’t be easy on the horses.’

  She stood back and gave him a direct look. ‘Nor on the men, I imagine.’

  He took Darby’s reins. ‘I wonder, would you like to ride?’

  ‘I don’t know how. It isn’t one of my accomplishments.’

  ‘I simply meant that I could lead you, to save you the walk back. This old gentleman’s very quiet, you need do no more than sit on board and hold the pommel.’

  She laughed, amused both by the idea and her own inexperience. ‘But how shall I get on?’

  He pointed to the wooden bench at the side of the porch. ‘Can you stand on that? If you use my arm to lean on.’

  ‘Even without the arm.’ She put one hand on the back of the bench and hoisted herself up, strongly and with no loss of dignity. ‘And now?’

  He held the stirrup, and Darby stirred, his big hooves clopping on the stones. ‘He’s going to go without me,’ Rachel exclaimed.

  ‘On the contrary, he’s looking forward to having a passenger. Put your right foot in the stirrup and sit sideways on the saddle. You couldn’t ride this way on Piper, but this one has a back as broad as a table.’

  ‘I shall take your word for it.’ She followed his instructions. ‘Well – here I am!’

  ‘Are you comfortable? Do you feel secure?’

  ‘At the moment, but then we’re not moving.’

  ‘Off we go.’

  When Harry looked back on that journey down the hill from the church to Bells he saw that it was the closest he came to an expression of his own feelings for Rachel. Leading the horse carefully, pausing now and again to check that she was secure and comfortable, he took a quiet pride in being her protector, and in seeing her safely home. When they reached the house he led her to the stable yard and allowed her to dismount by herself, only offering her a steadying hand as she stepped down from the block.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘I enjoyed my beginner’s pleasure ride. Perhaps in the future you could teach me to ride properly.’

  Ever since then he had cherished this small suggestion like a talisman, a hostage to fortune that would take him back to Bells to be of use.

  By the second week in August the armies camped around Varna might have been forgiven for thinking they had endured the fires of hell and could not suffer much more. But if so they were punished for their complacency with the outbreak of a real fire that laid waste half the town and provided the pretext for troops of all nationalities to sack the other half. In spite of the enormous weight of
manpower assembled in so small an area the generals issued no orders to control the excesses of the troops, though Harry and a handful of fellow officers were detailed to ride down to Varna and help enforce discipline and contain the worst of the looting.

  Having rounded up fifty or so blackened miscreants from the streets and driven them stumbling back to camp it was clear that the British soldier had confined himself to drinking what was left of Varna dry.

  ‘You would have thought,’ drawled Fyefield as they saw to the horses, ‘that they might have shown a little more imagination. They might as well have been in some provincial fair in England.’

  ‘Thank God for it,’ said Harry. ‘What would you prefer – rape, pillage, wholesale plunder? A bit of drunkenness is almost excusable.’

  ‘True,’ Fyefield acknowledged. ‘Just so long as it doesn’t addle them completely before the real action starts.’

  In the darkness, somebody laughed.

  It was impossible that such an impasse could continue indefinitely. Some sort of movement had to take place, and two weeks after the fire the order for embarkation to the Crimea came through: on 5 September.

  Men were still dying as they boarded the ships, but even the sickest were lugged aboard in the grim conviction that it would at least be preferable to die on the deck of an English frigate than the polluted soil of a Middle Eastern port.

  In spite of everything, spirits rose. To be back on the move, to be closing on their objective, to be going, at long last, to confront the enemy – all this improved morale.

  As Harry and the Light Brigade drew nearer to the embarkation point at Varna the evidence of cholera was still all around. The mass of hasty, shadow graves that disfigured the dry soil like a rash were many of them desecrated, dug up by scavenging dogs and by the Turks for blankets, the limbs of despoiled corpses jutting out like rotten tree roots. The dogs barked and snapped at them, to keep away. Once when Clemmie stumbled Harry looked down to see a human head beneath her hoof, half the face still clinging to the skull, an eyeball hanging from its socket. If they had thought Varna a squalid place on their arrival there, it was nothing to its condition now. There was only one thing to cheer Harry. Seeing in passing the French Post Office, pretty much dismantled, he called in with no very high expectations, to be handed no fewer than three letters – two of them from his parents and one from Rachel – which had got stranded there following the embarkation orders. These he kept, to read on the voyage.

  But at this late stage Piper would not board. Harry’s new groom, a wizened cockney sparrow named Betts, was at his wits’ end. He was a genius with horses and had immediately seen in Piper a rare breeding and spirit, but his charge’s furious terror was more than he could manage on his own. Grudgingly, barking instructions and abuse, Betts stood aside for the sailors to take over. But nothing that anyone could do in the way of ropes, chains and sheer brute manpower could move Piper without doing him an injury. Eventually he was so severely exercised, and his helpers so beside themselves with fury and impatience, that there was nothing left but for Harry himself to lead him back down to the quay and stand there, with Betts in attendance, attempting to comfort and quiet him.

  The bustle and racket all around was no help to either of them. Sweated up and sensing treachery on every hand, Piper was uncontrollable, lunging, rearing, kicking and sidling, stretching his neck with his eyes starting from his head and his ears laid back flat so that his pretty head took on the mean, flattened look of a cobra.

  Betts’s eyes darted here and there. ‘This is no place for ’im, sir.’

  ‘I know that, Betts, but perhaps a few minutes here will persuade him that boarding ship is a better alternative.’

  The little man shook his head.‘It’s going to get him beside ’isself.’

  He was right. When after some ten minutes on the quayside they attempted to lead him to the ship once more, even Betts was unprepared for the ferocity of Piper’s resistance. He simply threw himself backwards with all his considerable force, as he had done on the ship from England, scattering assorted traders and hawkers, and sending for six several barrels of fish and vegetables over the slippery cobbles and into the water. Betts, who had a gammy leg, was sent flying. As Harry struggled to tighten his grip on the headcollar he lost his footing and let it go altogether. Piper, at full stretch already, sprang away from him like an arrow from a bow and was gone, careering through the crowds like a whirling dervish, snapping and kicking up his heels, creating a wake of Middle Eastern pandemonium, screams and ululations and arms uplifted in supplication.

  Betts’s walnut-face was unreadable. ‘That’s a waste, sir,’ he said. ‘That’s a wicked waste.’

  When Harry sat on deck that night listening to the soft sounds of the pipe and mouth organ, and the croaking and rustling of the dying, he wept in the darkness for Hugo’s beautiful horse, now food for vultures in a foreign land.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  ‘Just to say, I love you madly

  To let you know I’m wild with lust.

  Did I mention you’re my hero?

  Just to say it’s shit or bust’

  —Stella Carlyle, ‘Just to Say’

  Stella 1990

  The woman on the links, Stella thought, was an almost perfect example of her kind. There were another two women playing with her, but she was first to the sixth green and Stella, who was walking on the dunes, paused to watch her putt.

  She herself had no interest whatever in golf or indeed in any game except rugby with which she’d acquainted herself grudgingly for Jamie’s sake, and if she was occasionally ambushed by it on television she switched off at once. She knew only that the object of the exercise at this stage was to get the ball into the small hole normally occupied by the flag.

  This the woman did efficiently, from a distance of some three metres. Stella couldn’t say whether this was particularly good, only that she couldn’t have done it herself which was no accolade.

  The woman now stood to one side, holding the flag. With her short dark hair, Black Watch tartan trews and Lovat green jacket she cut a rather military figure, like some plucky, standard-bearing lad. While her two friends followed their own rather less distinguished putts back and forth across the green she suddenly seemed to realise they were being watched and looked round at Stella, giving a quick, friendly, aren’t-we-all-duffers? sort of smile.

  When they’d finished on the green amid a murmur of sporting self-deprecation their route of a few metres to the next tee ran parallel with Stella’s on the beach, and she couldn’t resist pausing again as the dark woman planted her tee, selected a driver and addressed the ball. When she struck it, even Stella from her position of complete ignorance could see that it was a mighty blow, so perfectly timed and angled that the head of the club made a faint whistle, like an admiring exhalation, as it arced downwards, and the merest restrained ‘click’ on contact. The ball simply disappeared. Her two friends made generous noises and took their turns. Stella dawdled and watched for another couple of minutes.

  Though the dark woman’s looks were not of a type that Stella herself would ever have aspired to, she drew the eye. The well-cut black hair, the strong, clear-skinned face and trim figure, even that well-judged smile, positively screamed class, confidence and composure. It was no surprise that she handled her clubs with such perfect control. And the clothes – tartan trews might be anathema in just about any other location one cared to mention, but on the Ailmay links they were stylish and even witty. If one had to be that sort of woman, thought Stella as she went on her way, then that was the sort of woman one would want to be.

  She had never wished to be anyone but herself. She scarcely knew what it was to feel envy or jealousy, not because they were corrosive emotions best avoided by the sensible person, but because she regarded most other people’s lives, and their partners, with a mixture of astonishment and dismay. The level of fudge, of compromise, of make-do-and-mend required by most ordered lives and so-called ‘committ
ed’ relationships, appalled her.

  She walked for another half mile or so along the beach to where a promontory stuck out into the sea like a shaggy arm, shielding this bay from the next. Today’s was classic Ailmay weather – dark sky one side, brilliant blue the other, high cloud in between, a changeable light that swept over the sleek sand and ruffled sea with an effect like a stately glitter ball. At this moment the Fell looked benign and approachable, bathed in sunshine, but after almost a month on the island Stella knew better than to take its kindly aspect at face value. She’d wandered soaked, frozen and disorientated in fog on its lower slopes on more than one occasion, an experience which raised the ignominious spectre of the sassenach saved by mountain rescue at vast cost to the taxpayer. These days when she walked on the Fell she stuck to the less adventurous paths.

  This afternoon it was her plan to walk out to the end of the promontory to where the sea, even on a relatively calm day like this, fretted and fumed wonderfully over the rocks, and then to cut back along its far side to the coast road which provided the easy route home. The house was beginning to feel like home, and she to feel at home here. She even had the sense, possibly fanciful, that she was starting to be part of the scenery, that she was known as the tenant of Glenfee, the one with the strange clothes who had sung at the pub. She hadn’t repeated the performance since, but she didn’t rule it out. She’d been back several times and it was always suggested that she sing, but she’d declined and they’d left her alone. There was a natural discretion among the islanders, a taking of people at their face value, which she liked. No one had asked her about herself beyond where she was staying, but they’d liked her song and said so. When she was ready, they’d like to hear another. If that never happened, that was all right too.

  She didn’t know and couldn’t tell whether this general discretion extended to more personal matters, but she hoped so. Her lover’s car would have been conspicuous anywhere, and in a place where there was little traffic it stood out like a pig in a synagogue. It was one of his perverse charms that he seemed wholly without the caution gene. The Rolls arrived and departed with suicidal panache, not often it was true, but without warning and frequently in broad daylight.