Walter was pleased to see his companions again. His worst terrors seemed to have settled. When the sunlight faded from the heights he returned to the last two photographs, barely able to see them.
Both had been taken on the morning of the last Saturday within minutes of each other, and from the same position. Billy and Walter had changed at the hotel and travelled to Cremorne in ordinary clothes. Billy had found a patch of grass on the slope above the water, someone’s private garden with a pile of torso sized rocks on coarse grass that gradually slipped from focus as it swept up towards the lens. Nearly all Billy’s photographs were taken from a low angle, and all showed his eye for symmetry. One picture was of Walter, the other of Frances. Billy had placed Walter across on the right hand edge, so that in a seated pose, “reading” a magazine, he had the full weight of the rocks behind him.
“You’ve caught me,” said Walter. “You ought to take up photography as a job.” But he did not really think so, for Billy’s approach, though deft, was monotonous — he looked at nearly all his subjects in the same way.
Frances had been taken more squarely on, the effect being one of lightness. Even though the other components of the scene almost crowded in on her it was as if she floated, strung invisibly to the shrub at one shoulder, the rocks at the other — and was just tethered to the curvature of grass. She too was reading, only with the pages of the magazine scrolled anyhow under the spine. The fine bones of her hands were visible, and also the veins under her skin. She looked accepting — doing what she wanted — not actually reading, but seeming to. Not enjoying a quiet moment in the corner of a garden, but observed and memorialized at it.
Had she always been acting out a role?
With their departure date irreversibly fixed Frances had become wildly affectionate. Before and after the photographs she clung to Walter’s side, and back in the house asked him up to her room to “see something”, and there with the door closed behind him, among odours of powder and perfume, with a cupboard door hanging wide to show her petticoats, they had kissed. First while standing, and then while she sat on his knee, and finally dropping to embrace full length on the bed. She had removed her wide-lapelled jacket, but when things reached their intensest pitch and Walter’s blind fingers searched her high collar to release cold white buttons she abruptly kicked herself to her feet and thrust one arm and then another back into the rumpled jacket. She was flushed, her eyes shone, her teeth were white and her tongue red.
She pinned back a loose strand of hair while standing at the window and said in a light voice, “Don’t go, there’s so much to talk about.” Then she tugged at her cuffs and looked at him enquiringly.
“I’m not about to go anywhere. Does your mother know we’re here?”
“No, I mean don’t go away to the war.” She knelt beside the bed where Walter reclined full length, his heels propped on the ornate iron railing.
“I can’t stop home now.”
“What if,” Frances hesitated. She nodded at a book on her bedside table while clasping his hand. “Have you read Anna Karenina? She did what she wanted.”
“What if, what?”
“Oh, what if you didn’t go.” But that was not what she had been about to say. What if we were lovers — that was the unasked question.
“I can’t give it up now. It’s too late,” and his heart thumped because he knew that this resolute answer was the one she wanted.
“Still, I wish you could.”
Later that night after the theatre, following a change of plan that took Walter by surprise but not the other three, Frances had so abandoned herself to this wish that he knew he must stay — what else could be more important than the union that had so abruptly and miraculously become possible? But by then they were naked together on a narrow hotel bed.
And a week later, when she had farewelled him at the wharves, the plea seemed a mixture of joy and hysteria. First she had held him tightly, sobbing, “I’ll be alone. What shall I do? There’s only me.” And he had never thought it strange that when he awkwardly said, “I’ll marry you the minute I get back,” she had not replied, but had dried her eyes with her mother’s handkerchief and with curiosity asked, “What happens next?” The band had stopped playing, an order rang out. Then as they marched away she ran alongside and tossed her scarf among the wheeling soldiers, and he had caught a glimpse of her smile when someone whistled low.
But he had always been stupid in relation to Francis, he decided. At the theatre it had taken him a minute to realize, as he stood on a stairway with Billy during an interval, just what was going on. “The girls want to take a look at the hotel, after,” said Billy. Male forms jostled as they pushed past on their way to the crowded, urine-stinking cellar. Then Billy breathed the secret: “Actually they’ll stop the night with us. It’s fixed.”
When Walter handed the photographs back to Billy it was without expectation of ever seeing them again or indeed of ever seeing Billy again. And the feeling, far from being momentous, seemed everyday. There was nothing unusual about a fate meted out wilfully, but in the end inexorably, as the evidence on the heights showed. One thing was certain — they were parting friends.
“It all seems nonsense, what we done before,” said Billy. He meant everything — his life, Walter’s. In a few words he did something Walter never expected. He reached past the adult control of their friendship to the stormier days of truce and quarrel that seemed to have spanned all their lives, stretching back to when they were seated by their mothers on a rug, swaddled in capes and frocks, eyeing each other like members of hostile species.
“We got it all wrong, didn’t we?”
“I suppose we did.”
Having signalled his departure with this gust of generosity Billy seemed reluctant to leave. If love could do this to Billy, thought Walter, what might it not achieve? Billy told Walter that just before the night at the hotel with Diana he had been half inclined to chuck it in, and take up with a girl from St Peters who appeared one day at the camp looking for her brother, leaving Billy with an address and more than half a promise … But Walter mustn’t get him wrong, he would not have done anything, it was just that Diana woke him up to himself, she “threw him”. With Diana he knew he would have to become a bigger person, not just now and again but all his life. And at moments he thought he wasn’t equal to it.
Billy, who never cracked.
Did Frances do this to Walter? No, she wouldn’t have. The night at the hotel, Billy abruptly went on, had been Frances’s idea.
“Frances’s?”
“She put it up to Diana, who put it to me.”
“I would have been game,” Walter asserted, knowing that the others had picked his character exactly. He would have dithered, of course, and wasted time and asked everyone to think twice. He needed a fait accompli, which they gave him.
Was that why Billy had appealed to his sense of fair play, exploited it, rather, when at the theatre that night he had gone on to say: “Diana and me have talked about marriage.”
“Well, that’s good.” Walter had tried to shake Billy’s hand, but congratulations apparently were not in order.
“It’s only vague at the moment. An idea.”
They had finished at the urinal and again found themselves on the stairs. It was only right that Billy should have the opportunity to enjoy what would doubtless be his if there had been no war … This was the night Frances was expected to stay at the Benedettos’, but Diana had informed her mother of a last minute reversal of plan. With each mother believing her daughter to be in the care of the other, what else could be done?
“When you say ‘the night’,” Walter caught Billy’s sleeve to delay him, “do you mean —” and the sentence drifted into silence, completing itself in Walter’s raised eyebrows and in Billy’s confirming wink.
During the second half of the programme Frances hardly spoke, but held Walter’s hand or let hers rest on his knee as she leaned forward and laughed, or followed the action w
ith sober absorption. During a scene change she said, “I was sitting here, and you were over there. You looked so intense. Are you still the same person?”
“No. Frances —” The lights died and they kissed in the sudden blackness.
“Wal?”
They had shifted farther under the bank because someone had come by and pointed to a heap of rubble just out from the grasspatch, telling them that it had not been there this time yesterday, but of course they knew, didn’t they, that a Turkish shell wasted no time, though it whistled a mournful warning on its way. When they were safe Billy took his boots off.
“I thought you were going.”
“I am.”
He dropped the boots at arm’s length and sighed. The boots were his no longer: in the gloom they seemed to belong to a third, invisible person who had shuffled up to pose a question and now awaited a response. Billy peeled flakes of grey skin from his heels and rubbed between his toes to remove pellets of darker dirt. “Wal? Do you think we could make a proper go of it, me and Diana?”
Never before had he asked Walter’s advice.
“I think we could,” he went on, not waiting for an answer. “I’d like to start out somewhere on my own. She’d be in it.” He emphasized her vigour by patting the pocket where Diana’s sensible but impassioned epistle lay hidden. “You ought to take a trip up to Wellington some time. Somewhere near the river,” he mused, “round Bluey Clarke country. It’d do me. A few horses, hay — I worked there for a bloke called —”, his voice trailed off.
Walter prompted him: “Bluey told me about a murder.”
“He did? He don’t know a thing.”
“Do you?”
Billy grunted and reached for his boots. “What’s one body after all this? I found the wife of the farmer I worked for buried in a paddock. He gave me a hundred quid to shut up.”
“If you go back there, will you tell?”
“Dent hanged himself at Christmas.”
Charlie Bushel passed among the men with a message: “Off in five minutes,” and told Walter to collect his kit and to make sure he thanked Boof for lugging it down.
“As if you’re not well mannered,” said Billy, offering Walter another sign of esteem. But the very fact of his doing so was a measure of the rapid alteration in their fortunes.
Captain Naylor emerged from darkness and congratulated Walter on the good work he had done for Chaplain Fox.
“And who are you?” he asked, peering at Billy.
“I’m ‘The Murderer’”, Billy sardonically answered.
“Ah hah. You look kind enough. Keep it up, eh?” In the dark he touched his nose in habitual emphasis of its ugliness. “The Murderer?” And again he laughed.
“Well?” asked Billy, at last slinging his rifle across his back and collecting the leather telescope case. “If it all comes right at the end, what about it? She’s not my type, but that’s the secret. Y’know, I haven’t felt better in years. I feel — hell — what do I feel?” He laughed in the darkness and shook Walter’s hand, forgetting that he had asked yet another question and not waited for an answer. “You’ll be right,” he called over his shoulder to Walter as he plodded off. “Remember Ethel and what she said? She’s always spot on.”
Then in file Walter’s squadron stumbled past empty crates with planks like mammoth ribcages, and heard donkeys braying but no trace of the bleating sheep, and were pleased to see in these gullies near the beach that the wounded had been shifted with none replacing them in the vacant bloodstained places. Then they found themselves tending south where the steep-sided gullies widened as if spreading their arms, and the enemy lines obliged by curving farther off across flatter ground, and a wider expanse of the sea, they knew, would in the morning become visible, though now it was just an awareness of a greater blackness rucked against the land like an immense bedspread.
Miraculously there was straw to sleep on. They burrowed in, and without talking turned over to stare at a sky full of stars. At home on mild nights Walter liked to lie in the grass and force himself to view the night sky not as a dimensionless scattering of points of light but as a deep and dark crystal wherein near and far were related, with the earth and the patch of it he occupied bonded to the farthest reach of space. Could it be so here, among these odd northern constellations?
After the tears and frantic questioning of why she was here, what were they doing, and how it was wrong, so terribly wrong, Frances had stared into the moonlit yard of the hotel with fingers covering her mouth while Walter sat on the bed with his hands dangling between his knees thinking the same thoughts. Neither spoke.
Earlier, on their arrival from the theatre, Billy and Diana had gone up first, and after a wait Walter and Frances followed. When they found the foyer deserted, and unglimpsed entered the shadowy stairwell, she had giggled, hurrying him along from behind with nervously playful pushes. But in the room her mood changed. A step had been taken from which there was no turning back. What could Diana have been thinking to talk her into it? She wished she had not agreed. Then she named Billy as the force behind this shameful adventure. Billy did not know right from wrong and did not care. She blamed the war. Why was Walter going? Did he have to? He must believe that without the war she would not have agreed to come. Did he believe her?
“Walter?”
She drew a breath and waited for him to snip the thread of her performance. She wanted to feel arms closing tightly around her, she wanted to sink into the room’s darkness which was without morality, without obligation — unless, as she half feared, morality consisted wholly of reaction to practical consequence. And such a concern, to be truthful, had forcefully overcome her upon entering the unlit room with its moonwhite square of window, its virginal bedspread, and the pale tiles surrounding a tiny grate. For her childhood had been spent being chased in and out of such rooms with their tidewrack of partnerings guilty and otherwise. She heard footsteps in the corridor and irrationally wondered if it was her father, or someone who knew him and would tell, or a drunken guest or merely a strange one — the kind who opened doors by mistake, and stared.
To sweep her clear of such fears she was dependent on a person whose strength was no greater than hers — who was himself a victim of prevarication and awe. An absurd feat confronted him. He was incapable of imagining how the fully-clothed Frances with her turned back would become the undressed Frances in his arms. How comically ignorant he was, not of the practical motions that must follow (the stallion and the mare hid no secrets) but of the human etiquette involved. There must be words to accompany that abrupt union: how ridiculous not to know them.
Frances felt a mixture of curiosity and impatience. She rubbed the glass and it squeaked, so she turned and smiled. But Walter was staring at the floor. Would her life never begin?
“You mustn’t think I won’t come back,” he said, looking up. “Ethel saw it clear as anything.”
“What is it about this Ethel? Is she nice?”
“We went walking at the picnic. After a while she kissed me.”
“Did you kiss her in return?”
“You’ll have to guess.”
“I’ll bet you did.”
“Why?”
Frances crossed the floor and balanced herself on the edge of the bed. “You couldn’t resist her. She’s prettier than me.”
“But you’ve never met her. She’s not.”
“Not prettier?”
“She knows who you are. She’s watched you at the station.”
They kissed, bumping foreheads. Frances twisted herself closer. Her mouth was dry. Then she lost balance, and a second later they found themselves side by side on the bed.
“Did you touch her?”
“Yes.”
“Where?”
Frances seemed lashed into starched layers that nowhere gave access to anything soft. He could feel heat rising from her cheeks and then, in a gust, a closer heat released from her loosened bodice.
“She touched me.”
So it went on, until piece by piece clothing was negotiated to the floor.
She said, “I’m cold,” and as he drew up the cover she became someone else entirely — not the sociable person of irresolute and tempting gestures, nor the soul he sometimes thought of as deep and at other times as vaporous, nor the figure in time on whose past and future he made tentative claim. She existed, in that moment, as nothing more than a body. And it was with the intelligence of one body seeking entrance into another, and with the foolish and human practicalities also involved, that these two finally met.
“May I,” Walter murmured politely, “put my … self … in there?” He placed a hand between her legs and felt her respond with a bolt of sensation to his wondering exploration of a rustling dry and then suddenly humid place. The question was needless but she whispered “Yes,” her head turned sideways into the pillow. There was a moment of blindness then as Walter’s searching engaged in a baffled encounter, but all at once clumsiness ended and an embrace became possible that placed the body of Frances closer to him even than his own, with fragments of perfumed ear and hair, nipple and buttock, bone and pulsing artery rising through him, then all swirling, as in a whirlpool, softly enclosing both in one or the other’s amazed sigh before spilling from walls down to a centre, an endlessly promising descent of sensation in which Frances showed she was one with Walter, unreservedly one, by uttering a delighted, drowning cry.
Lying in straw, with the stars refusing to deepen overhead but maintaining a frosted flatness, Walter slowly became aware of a closer horizon than the one actually marking earth from sky. It was a nearby hill, a hump of darkness with two low ridges flowing out to enclose the sleeping men like the walls of an unlit amphitheatre. Half awake, half dreaming Walter thought: it’s as though we’re on stage and out there is an audience seated on dark tiers.
In the past twenty-four hours Walter had definitely changed. On this day of no shooting, he realized, he had narrowed his hopes for himself and dulled his nervous excesses — and he resolved to cling to this dullness. The speculations of the likes of Reg Hurst were trapped between walls formed by pickets of crosses. Even here in this herb-scented hollow Walter had seen efficient stacks of crosses ready to mark the remains of those who surrounded him, still dreaming or praying, calling out in their sleep, hungry, or thirsty, or sleeplessly rising to poke at sad embers with a stick.
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