Dead-Nettle

by John Buxton Hilton

  The upshot of it was that he wanted to marry her. It was not that he was beginning to be filled already with puritanical remorse. The life he was leading with her was too vital for that, too elemental – and too continuous. But he was unable to distinguish between love and physical impulse, and love and marriage simply were not separate entities in his ethical background.

  She ran the whole range of conventional ways of putting him off; naive shock and surprise at his declamation; a plea for thinking time; a spate of self-denigration that he mistook for a charming trick to make him flood her with denials.

  ‘But you don’t know me, Frank. You don’t know what a horrible woman I am, under the surface.’

  ‘There’s nothing horrible about you.’

  ‘You don’t know some of the things I have done in my time.’

  Beyond the need she felt to discourage him, I think she had developed a definite affection for him – of a sort.

  ‘I don’t care about anything that happened in the past, he said.

  How suicidal can a man become?

  ‘No, Frank – I’m not for you. Let’s enjoy what we’ve had. Let’s go on enjoying it while we can. But let’s not kid ourselves about the future.’

  But it was beyond his character to adopt such an attitude. Then, unaccountably, she changed her mind.

  Unaccountably: even when he talked to me about it, on the crumbling remains of the Dead-Nettle crushing-wheel, the poor devil still did not know what it was all about. He had never been able to read the clues, though it had struck him at the time as difficult to understand how so much of his private affairs seemed to be general knowledge in the platoon limes.

  ‘What’s all this about wanting to get married?’ Gilbert Slack had asked him.

  ‘Who told you about that?’

  ‘Hetty told Patsy. And you must be a bloody idiot, Frank. You need to get hold of yourself. Find’em, fool’em and forget’em, that’s my motto. Whip it in, whip it out and wipe it.’

  ‘That’s not my way of looking at things.’

  ‘But what do you think you’re ever going to do with her, Frank? You’ve another six years’colour service still to get in.’

  ‘That’s not a life-time, Gilbert. She’ll wait.’

  ‘You think so?’

  ‘She wouldn’t have me anyway,’ Frank said, paradoxically.

  ‘You never want to go by a woman’s first answer,’ Gilbert told him. ‘I happen to know that you’ve bowled her off her feet. And she was supposed to be a hard nut to crack.’

  ‘Where did you get that from?’

  ‘From Patsy.’

  The next evening, Hetty changed her mind. To Frank Lomas it was a sacred moment. Though bubblingly happy about it, Hetty did not behave as if she had radically reversed a decision. It was almost as if, on an impulse, she had turned in to buy a new hat that she had been looking at for days in a shop window.

  They made an appointment with the vicar. Neither of them was on the parish roll, but within the compass of the law, the church counted – or could be made to count, if the priest-in-charge was willing – as Hetty’s normal place of worship. It might easily have gone the other way, but a certain latitude was adopted to accommodate a passing soldier.

  The second time the banns were read, the battalion was on Sunday parade in the village church. It seemed as if every neck, from the Adjutant to the youngest bugler, was twisted towards Lomas when his name was announced.

  On the Tuesday after that week-end there was an infusion of new activity in their camp. Several officers returned from furlough. There was an issue of tropical kit from the Quartermaster’s store. Lomas’s platoon sergeant stood before them with a new joy in his animal eyes.

  ‘Say goodbye to your sweethearts and wives.’

  The regiment was confined to camp pending overseas draft. Lomas knew nothing that he could do about it. He did not think of asking his company officer to intercede for a special licence for them. He did not know enough about the marriage laws. And in any case, his was not that kind of company officer. He would have had to wait forty-eight hours even to speak to him, having submitted a written request through the sergeant.

  Then suddenly the padre waylaid him on a wagon scrubbing fatigue.

  ‘What’s all this about you getting married, and the third banns not called, Private Lomas?’

  Apparently the chaplain had heard it all from the vicar, and demanded now to hear it all again from Frank.

  ‘And is she –? Is the young lady –?’

  He looked meaningfully at Frank. Frank blushed. It was a possibility that had occurred to him.

  ‘Well, we shall have to do something about it, then, shan’t we? We shall have to see if the Bishop, in the circumstances, will grant us his licence. And I’ll have to ask the Colonel if we can marry you on a special church parade. It would do us all good, I am sure, at a time like this, to show a little military swagger.’

  And that was how it was carried out. The Colonel entered into the spirit of it as if it were the very thing that his regiment’s morale needed on the eve of embarkation. The battalion fell in in hollow square under command of the Regimental Sergeant-Major, the Corps of Drums leading. Lomas’s platoon applied themselves to a man to the dressing and polishing of him. They stood him on a sheet of newspaper, as they did with men detailed for guard, so that he should not damage the shine on the studs of his boots before the moment of the ceremony. The grossness of the men’s conversation knew no limits.

  He was not allowed to see Hetty before they marched him out to the parade square. It was said to be unlucky. He had not set eyes on her since before the news of their departure had been announced. She appeared to have been entertained in the officers’ mess on the wedding morning, and was actually given away by the Senior Subaltern. Fortunately neither Lomas nor any of his mates knew of the concept of droit de seigneur. They seemed to have plied her, too, with a good deal to drink. And indeed, most of the lieutenants on parade were in similar case. Lomas had no chance to exchange any talk with her at all as the padre intoned the service. But her speech was almost too slurred for her to repeat the necessary phrases after him, and Lomas desperately wanted to help her out with them.

  An undisciplined cheer went up from a thousand right-dressed men when he kissed her, under the padre’s orders. Then they were led by a drummer to a single bell-tent that had been pitched at an extremity of the compound. Lomas was made to lift her in his arms and carry her under the flap. An orderly then lashed up the canvas from outside and a bugler sounded No Parade. The battalion certainly appears to have enjoyed itself that day.

  Hetty fell asleep – or into a stupor – the moment he laid her on the bed. She was still in a virtual coma the next morning when he had to leave her. It had been a long night, a lonely and dark one under canvas (by oversight or intention no lamp had been provided for them). He stroked Hetty’s sweating brow for an hour at a time, but was unable to establish any communication with her.

  The next morning, a runner called Lomas early. It was as if the army, to round off the verve with which it had risen to the emergency, had also judged it fit to operate a came the dawn reminder. Lomas’s fun was over. So was everyone else’s. He was at work before general Reveille, one of the baggage party, forming a chain of stores to wagons for the first stage of their journey to the Cape.

  There were women with handkerchiefs held to their reddened eyes on the platform of Sturry Station as the band from the Depot played Auld Lang Syne to the departing train. But Hetty Lomas was not up and about in time to be amongst them. It was more than seven years before Lomas was to see her again, walking up to meet him in a Derby street, with Duncan Motters-head waiting as potential master of ceremonies in a darkened archway.

  On the troop-ship, and from camps all over South Africa, he had written to her at the address in Kent which he believed to be hers, but there came no reply. He asked the padre to have enquiries made, and this the padre promised him would be done. But he conti
nued without news and was not convinced that behind the scenes and across the oceans any man was bothering on his behalf.

  When he was finally discharged from military hospital, he made his way again to St Nicholas-at-Wade, where he failed signally to compose a working description of her. Try as he may, he could find no trace. Nor could he get anyone to remember Gilbert Slack’s Patsy or Harry Burgess’s Kate.

  ‘Of course,’ someone said in the ‘Bell.’ When all those troops were formed up here to wait their turn for Southampton, there was a whole pack of girls came in from Aldershot.’

  Then he caught sight of Frank Lomas’s brow and his dangling hand, and he hastened to add, ‘But she wouldn’t have been one of those.’

  Aldershot: a village in Hampshire?

  She’d said that, hadn’t she, speaking perhaps with some measure of truth.

  Chapter Sixteen

  He came to Margreave and Dead-Nettle, pitted himself against the mother rock, made friends with Isobel Fuller. Then suddenly a letter came for him. How could his wife possibly have discovered his whereabouts? It could only have been through Gilbert Slack. No doubt he was still in touch with regimental friends, and one or other of them, by some chance, with Hetty.

  It was a pathetically silly letter. She must have pinned child-like faith in his credulity; and not in vain – she got him to Derby.

  She had lost, she said, the little diary in which she had noted his regimental address. She had written to him many letters, with many tentative designations. They must have all gone astray. She had even applied to the War Office, who had sent her no reply. It had all been hopeless.

  And of course what has made it so much worse is that you are not the only Frank Lomas now. You wouldn’t have wanted me to call him anything but Frank, would you, my darling?

  He did not believe a word that she said in the first part of the letter. Her transparent falsity sickened him. But this talk of the birth of a son called out – as it was meant to – to every last nuance of his plodding old sense of duty. He had to go to Derby, and wrote to her at the address she now gave him – Emma Rice’s boarding-house. He gave her a date and a time.

  And he had to bring her back from Derby to Margreave even though, in the moment he recognised her coming up that street, he saw her for exactly what she was. These were the eyes into which he had looked on the river bank at St Nicholas, the cheeky eyes that had taught him how to make love to her own satisfaction, the clouded eyes that had not known where she was, when she had stood at his side on the church parade.

  And he must have been making comparisons now with Isobel Fuller.

  He brought Hetty back to Dead-Nettle. She said that she had left their son with a cousin. In Hampshire. It could possibly be true. So Lomas would stand by the pair of them, even though by now he hated her with a hatred that defied expression, a hatred which he frankly confessed to me. Was it a hatred strong enough for him to have killed her?

  I have said that at the outset he was my man. My certainty had weakened as he unfolded his tale of naive integrity and rough-hearted tenderness. But now, as he owned to his hatred, I knew that my sympathy might now – and at any moment – have to defer to my duty.

  Had he hated her, more than anything else, for the damage she had wrought between him and Isobel? Might she, in the end, have lost her temper and jeered at him, lashed out and boastfully revealed the tawdry arts with which she had manipulated him, that far off fair-day in Kent? Would she, as a woman of her kind, have sought to put back the clock by enticing him to make love to her again in that lead-miner’s shack? And might he not, after such an encounter, have turned against her in counter-revulsion? Was there such a clear-cut dividing line between animal sex and animal murder?

  There was a tale that had gone round the village, P.C. Newton had included it in his notes: Hetty Lomas’s scream that had riven the countryside, the first night she was here. Had that been an intimation of violence to come?

  I asked Lomas bluntly about it. He remembered it as if it were something from an existence already forgotten.

  ‘I can tell you about that,’ he said.

  ‘I’m asking you.’

  ‘She screamed because she saw me take off my trousers.’

  I forbore to say that her outlook on life must have undergone a remarkable change.

  ‘She saw me take off my trousers and she caught sight of my leg – my wound, the twisted muscle that’s left of it, my distorted foot. I know it’s pretty horrible. I can imagine the sight of it turning anyone sick. I wouldn’t have thought, though, that it would make a woman scream out into the night.’

  ‘That depends on the woman.’

  ‘It’s funny, because –’

  ‘What’s funny about it?’

  ‘Oh, nothing.’

  I did not know at that moment of Isobel’s reaction to the same wound. I let the subject go now. I did not want to be side-tracked.

  Had Frank Lomas simply come home unexpectedly early from Chapel to find her in the act of pulling down his wall, looking for Gilbert Slack’s plunder in his home? Had Slack offered her a sizeable share, in exchange for retrieving it for him? Had she and Slack been in league with each other ever since that spring in Kent? And if Lomas had come to a sudden realisation of that, even the suspicion of it, would there have been any stopping him? Hadn’t violence crossed his mind, even in that moment of understanding in the Derby street?

  Lomas was no fool – at bottom. He read my mind, if not in detail, at least in outline. Not for the first time while we had been talking together, his eyes strayed in the direction of the cottage.

  ‘I didn’t kill her,’ he said, for the first time, with a simplicity that many men would have found telling, but against which I schooled myself.

  ‘No?’

  ‘No. But I did kill a woman once. It’s not a thing that brings me any pride, and it’s not a thing that a man could do twice.’

  He wanted me to ask him to go on, but I allowed a short silence to increase the tension. Somewhere a crow shrieked, driving a marauder away from his private carrion. In the distance we heard the crump of blasting in one of the quarries.

  ‘That reminds me of the very time,’ Lomas said.

  ‘Tell me about it.’

  It had been in the later stages of the war. There had been a sudden desperate strait, an unexpected flush of casualties. The order had been cooks, officers’servants, even sanitary corporals in the ranks. Lomas’s platoon had been sent out on a forward patrol, to try to engage and pin down a ranging troop of Boer horsemen. His lieutenant and sergeant had both been killed. The command of the patrol had devolved on him, but the men – Slack amongst them – had started their own council of war about what to do next. They were for pressing back the way they had come. No one took Frank Lomas’s honourable stripes seriously.

  Yet he suddenly entrenched himself and stood firm on his authority. He could see that the only sane thing to do was to go to earth before twilight and try to regain the battalion at dawn. He threatened to lay charges, on their return, against any man who was insubordinate.

  ‘Including you,’ he said to Slack.

  ‘Don’t be an imbecile, Frank.’

  ‘Try me out, then.’

  ‘It’s funny, Mr Brunt. They didn’t have to do what I said. If they’d stuck together and defied me, I’d have had no evidence against them. I’d nothing on my side bar the tone of my voice.’

  Which showed me again that Lomas was no dummy. He could rise to occasions – when he was moved. It was a pity it had always taken so much to stir him.

  He put down the patrol under cover on the outskirts of a farmstead that appeared to be deserted – a likely possibility, since the men-folk were probably out skirmishing, and the women all gathered in a central corral elsewhere. He drew up a watch-roster for the coming night. And he allowed Gilbert Slack to go foraging. That was a reasonable proposition: their own supplies were thin, and Slack was a good provider. He made his way over to the farm and was a
long time gone. They saw him coming back across a yard carrying a crate of what looked like home-made wine. From the nature of his progress, it was obvious that he had already assured himself of its potency.

  Lomas lay looking over his cover when a shot was fired and a bullet chipped stone only inches from Slack’s foot. Lomas saw a woman with a Mauser at her shoulder, taking fresh aim through the upper half of a stable door.

  She was middle-aged, matronly in a fleshless way and had been blonde in her youth, though her hair was now the colour of dirty straw and pulled tightly across her head from a central parting. Someone called out – uselessly – to warn Gilbert. Lomas steadied his foresight over the woman’s left breast, clasped the cold stock of his Lee Enfield against his cheek and took first pressure on the trigger. It seemed an age before he could summon up the nerve to fire his bullet. Seconds elapsed like taut empty hours. Then he squeezed his forefinger.

  ‘Me, Mr Brunt. I killed her. Can you look at me now, knowing anything about me at all, even what little bit you’ve found out in the last few minutes, and believe that I’d do a thing like that?’

  I thought of no ready answer. That he’d done it to defend a friend? It wasn’t the first story I’d heard in which the true horror of war had been something apart from the main issue. Lomas spoke again before I could.

  ‘I saw the jerk of her body as the bullet hit her. A working woman, the mother of a family, a grandmother too, probably, firing at an intruder who was robbing her larder. I saw that look come into her eyes: the shock, and then the final, clear understanding. I must have hit her somewhere vital: the main artery below the heart, I think. She dropped her rifle and died within seconds – but they were long seconds, seconds in which she knew she was going to die, just as for long seconds I had known I was going to kill her. The look on her face has been with me ever since.’