At the top he found the wind. At first it refreshed him, then it began to burrow into his head. He crossed over and found a place under the brow of the hill, a dent, a ledge, where he could sit and have some shelter. Below him was a view made up as much of water as of land. To the north was another hill, isolated like the one he was on, though much higher. The rest was like a shattered plate with shards of land connected by narrow isthmuses, land that struck him as being more frail than the water, as if it stood only by the water’s consent and would, at a time of the water’s choosing, be covered again.
He touched his legs, the damp cloth, the cold cloth, then looked, like a lunatic, at his own bare hands. Where were his nankeen trousers? He felt about himself, looked back at the hill above him, hurried up there hoping for something pale lying on the dark of the heather. There was nothing. He had dropped them. Or he had put them down when he drank from the stream and had forgotten to pick them up again. He went back to the ledge, sat and held his head. He passionately wanted his nankeen trousers and their loss seemed the loss of his ability to maintain purpose, to act purposefully in the world. He pressed the skin of his face, ground at it with the heels of his palms. For three or four seconds he did not know what he was, and when things returned to him—his true name, his assumed name, his rank, his family, his crime—they came without their old solidity as if, one by one, they were being offered to him in the form of questions. He groaned—though it seemed already the moment for such an expression had passed. He let his hands drop. Below him, the moon was rising, the moon at its first quarter, still very low, one horn resting on the earth, then, as he watched, lifting free. He hoped for poetry, something noble and remembered, but managed only to repeat “moon,” wonderingly, until the word lay on his tongue like a silver penny. But he was calm now, packed away by the drug, by fatigue. Even the realisation that he had left the bag and the fiddle down by the landing place did not enter deeply. The fiddle he had been holding on to like his father’s hand; he would do better without it. As for the rest, the pistol, the writing case, somebody would want them.
He rolled on to his side and threw up. Water, whisky. The tincture too, presumably. He waited, trembling, then shoved himself away from the ground, first to his knees, finally to his feet. He was suddenly quite certain that if he tried to spend the night on the hill he would die on it. He would be found up there with a crow on his chest, be buried in an unmarked grave. Or with the name Lovall above him.
He started down. There were people on this island somewhere. He would not ask them for much. Some shelter, a bite of bread. And if they would not open their doors to him (oh, the savages!) he would find a byre and sleep with the cows again . . .
He was halfway down when he saw a point of light, fragile in a fold of dark just beyond the base of the hill. He stared at it, fixed his gaze like a compass needle, then went on more swiftly, more carelessly, sprawling several times full-length in the heather, getting up, finding the light again and keeping going. He stumbled through the ring of bracken, through the roots of things, through shallow water. He smelled smoke, and a minute later he came to a house, the light spilling from a window imperfectly shuttered, and at either end of the thatched roof a chimney, one of them sending its smoke across the face of the moon. And there was . . . yes! . . . singing! He went close, pressed himself against the wall. A voice, unaccompanied. Their own language of course. A wavering voice, husky, wonderfully foreign . . .
He felt his way to the door, groped for a latch, found one, raised it, and walked into the low confusing light of the interior.
There were six or seven of them, sitting in a semicircle by the fire. On stools, on chairs; two, side by side, on a chest. The song broke off. An old dog, blind, white-snouted, growled at him out of its belly. Someone called it back. They looked at him. They were watchful but not, it seemed, much startled. He made a bow to them, which ended unsteadily. For a man who had been out in the air for hours, he felt surprisingly drunk. A chair was fetched. The others shifted back a little to accommodate him. He sat. He did not know if he was in a private house or a tavern of some kind. Certain objects made their presence felt. A great black kettle, a spinning wheel, a storm lantern. In the fire the peat had furred itself in grey and the smell of the house was the smell of the fire.
He took the whisky bottle from his pocket. There was only a mouthful left. He offered the bottle to the man on his left. The man gravely took it, and after pausing a moment, touched the neck to his lips, drank nothing, and passed it back. A square of black bread was put into Lacroix’s hand. He dropped it, picked it up. The singing returned or it had never stopped.
He tried to mark time with the bread but only succeeded in dropping it again. The blind dog, he thought, will come for it eventually. It will swim out like an eel.
Did they know who he was? He felt sure that they did, that even if they had not seen for themselves his arrival on the cow they had heard of it. So be it. He was in no condition to pretend, to present himself as anything other than what they saw. Show up like this in an English village and they’d take you to the lockup, or better still, march you to the parish boundary and put a boot in your arse. Here, presumably, the parish boundary was the sea.
They took it in turns to sing. He wondered if he would have to sing too, if he should, if that would be the correct thing to do. What could he remember? “As I Walked Forth”? “Black-eyed Susan”? He was hunting about for words when there was a shifting on the stool beside him and looking over he saw there was a new man there, a man in a red jacket. Lacroix sat up. The man nodded to him. Sandy hair, pale eyes. Twenty-five—no, thirty-five, at least, the skin around his eyes pinched with crow’s feet. The jacket had a tartan patch on the elbow (tartan at last!). Yellow collar and yellow cuffs. At the ends of the cuffs there were no hands. The man turned away to the fire. Still looking there he said something, but too softly.
“I cannot hear you,” said Lacroix. “My ears . . . ”
The man spoke again, this time with his face to Lacroix and leaning towards him a little.
“Have you come far?”
Such a simple question yet he did not know how to answer it. He did not answer.
“My name is Ranald,” said the man. “I live on the island. I am from the island. Do you have a place to sleep?”
“You were a soldier,” said Lacroix.
“I was. From a boy.”
“And your hands?”
“In Egypt.”
A new song began. The singer was one of the women on the meal chest. She appeared elderly, someone’s grandmother, but her voice piped like a girl’s.
“I have lost my fiddle,” said Lacroix. “My bag. My trousers . . . ”
“They are all safe,” said Ranald. “Can you walk a little?” He stood and moved to the door. Lacroix followed him. After the light in the house he felt blind outside. He took the other’s arm and let himself be guided. They walked a mile. Perhaps it only felt like a mile. Other than their own footsteps it was just the night birds and the now-and-then sound of running water, like the playing of small glass bells. They came to a house. It was on its own and loomed out of nowhere. Ranald tapped at the door with his elbow but went in without waiting for an answer. The door was very low. Even men of modest stature—and neither Highland infantry nor light cavalry were tall—could brain themselves going in in a hurry in the dark. Lacroix thought of the grave barrows he had explored as a boy with his father on the Wiltshire Downs. His father’s bent back, the dance of the candlelight. It was well known that wild men sometimes slept out in the barrows. Fugitives, curled in the burial chambers . . .
“Through here!”
A passage, a second door. Ranald was kneeling by the side of a fire that burned dully in the middle of the room. He put his face near the ground and blew on the embers until two or three small blue flames appeared.
“The house belongs to an old man you will se
e in the morning,” he said. “He is called Jesse. You can stay here. He will not trouble you.”
“In Lisbon,” said Lacroix, “I slept in an onion loft.”
Ranald nodded. He was spreading straw on the ground. He seemed to manage well enough without hands. He made a bed beside the smouldering peat. The smoke-hole was not directly above the fire-pit and the smoke gathered in lazy wreaths under the roof.
“Here,” said Ranald. “It is good to rest now.”
Lacroix sat on the straw. Ranald held out a tin cup to him that Lacroix assumed would have whisky in it but it turned out to be water. He drank then lay on the straw. Ranald draped a blanket over him. Like a mother, like a sister. Lacroix spoke for a while though he did not know if Ranald was still there, if anyone was. He shifted himself, writhed worm-like, until he had his face under the smoke-hole and could see through to the sky, a single blue star. The music of the old woman’s song went through him like the blood-memory of the sea. He was being handed down, deeper and deeper. For a while he did not dare to shut his eyes, to lose sight of the star. Then he could not fight it any longer and he let himself go.
10
They headed north on tracks, greenways, hollow ways. The river was never far away. If they could not see it they could hear it, or see between the trees the light it carried.
Sometimes they rode side by side; sometimes the way was too narrow and Medina would fall behind a little. The trees were in their first true green. Birds darted to and fro across the track, dark against the green-shine of the new leaves.
The noise of rain on the leaves, an hour in the darkness of a passing storm. Then the light pouring in through a thousand openings, the men’s coats steaming, the horses spooked by the flicker of a shadow, by things the men could neither see nor hear.
They bought bread and cheese and cider from isolated farms. They did not steal, did not enter into conversation beyond what was necessary. Now and then they passed others on the road, skilled men with tools over their shoulders, labourers with nothing but a rolled blanket, a stick to walk with. They passed a camp of gypsies—men, women and animals lolling under the trees. A cautious nodding of heads. Some of the gypsies looked closely at Medina, looked as if they might address him.
At a place near nowhere, the woods thick and the track itself seeming to hesitate, they saw the figures of men and boys, slender as deer and as watchful. Calley unbuttoned his coat. They kept the horses going, picked their way through to where the track was plain again, glanced behind themselves.
“Runaways,” said Calley.
“Runaways?”
“’Prentice boys. Mill hands. Soldiers. All sorts.”
They slept that night in a dell by the edge of the woods. The night was mild. They slept on their backs, both men mostly silent in sleep, both gently flooded by the air they breathed. When they woke they found themselves observed by cattle. One of these they milked, swallowed down the blood-warm milk then walked the horses back into the woods, two men advancing, the war spooling from their backs like silk.
On the third day, coming out of the woods on to open ground and crossing towards the river—the river broad and brown and lined with reeds and bulrushes—they came upon a body, stripped and spread-eagled in the long grass. They looked down from their saddles, could see no wounds, and though the sound and shadow of their horses did not disturb the man it was clear that he was sleeping rather than dead.
Closer to the bank they found others. Pale men, peeled men, sprawled, delighted by sleep. Soft bodies softly breathing. Not the bodies of farm boys or runaways. Then, from the water beyond the reeds, came laughter, scraps of song. They climbed down from their horses and went to look. Four, five men, swimming and splashing.
After a while one of the men noticed them. He was about their own age but bigger than either of them, shoulders like a grenadier’s. He raised an arm in greeting, shouted something neither could make sense of but which made the others laugh. He swam to the bank and waded out on to the curve of river-gravel that served them as a beach. He was as naked as the sleepers in the grass. He stood there, unashamed, as the water poured off him. He welcomed them, called himself Phyrro (though later, Calley would say he had called himself Boy-o like a Welshman). He was, he said, a pilgrim, a traveller, an apostle. He invited them to take off their clothes and come into the water. “All men are brothers,” he said. “And the women”—waving his hand towards a group of females who, dressed and red-faced from the heat, were busy tramping the long grass and preparing a camp—“they are our brothers too.” He grinned endearingly, then turned away and walked his heavy arse back into the water.
For another minute Calley and Medina watched them. Then Medina sat on the grass and began tugging at a boot. “Even on campaign,” he said, “there is some resting. Some pleasure.”
Calley made a sound, a little reflex of contempt, but raised no objection. Medina dropped his clothes around him, stepped down on to the gravel. The touch of the river against his bare feet excited him. He laughed and, to the cheering of the other swimmers, threw himself into the deeper water, surfacing again in their midst, his black hair flattened against his cheeks.
Some of the women came to the bank. They were of different ages, though most seemed young. They wore walking boots and dusty-hemmed dresses. They had the practical appearance of camp followers, looked fitter than the men, wore on their faces the cheerful, unfocused smiles of the devoted. They bobbed their heads to Medina, but soon returned their gaze to the large man, to Phyrro.
In the water the men splashed about, swam in circles, said whatever the water suggested to them. The day was warm but the river was cold. One by one they came out and settled themselves in the grass. Medina dried himself with his shirt then spread his shirt over the points of grass. He did not know where Calley was and didn’t care. He made a pillow of his coat, slept. When he woke it was cooler and he dressed and joined the others by the fire. The women had made a soup, a broth. They gave him some in a mug. It tasted of herbs, of things picked from the hedgerows and wayside. Later, the brandy bottle came round. Some of the men smoked. There were songs, recitations. The day drained slowly into the river. Phyrro was lying with his head in a woman’s lap. His eyes were shut but he was speaking, his life spilling through him as a chain of words. People told Medina their names but they were like stage names—Diodorus, Zeno. None of them, he thought, was real. He gave his own name as Sancho.
Lounging at the edge of the circle, a fullness of ease he had not enjoyed since rooftop tertulias at home before the war, he looked across to the river in time to see the flash of a kingfisher, and following the line of its flight, the green ghost of it, he saw Calley standing in the shallows with his trousers rolled. It was hard to say exactly what he was doing other than staring at the water’s surface, its skim of golden insects. Then he stepped away from the bank, was still again, and after a pause took another step so that the water was well above his knees. Medina sat up, wondering if he would launch himself out into the river, begin to swim, to float, to sink. But if there was a moment when he considered it, it passed, and he turned and came back clumsily to the bank, clambered out.
Medina refilled his mug with the broth from the kettle. He took it down to Calley, who accepted it.
“All wankers,” said Calley mildly. “Every one of them.”
“Yes,” said Medina, who did not know the word and thought perhaps Calley had said “walkers.” Then he saw the bird again, darting from the far bank, as green as a scarab. He pointed but found himself pointing to nothing.
Calley nodded. “I could drop the big cunt with one punch,” he said.
“Yes,” said Medina.
“Fuck it. Even you could.”
Medina thanked him.
“I mean it,” said Calley. “I think you could.”
They grinned at each other. Calley sipped the soup. “Why can’t they make tea,” he sa
id, “like normal cunts?”
In the first of the morning, while the others slept on under a veil of river mist, Calley shook Medina awake and the two of them, with no conversation, saddled their horses, mounted them and rode away. Looking back, Medina saw Phyrro standing with his head and shoulders above the mist watching them go. They followed the river bank. The day progressed, grew warm again. As the mist dissolved they saw they were riding through a mile of poppies. Later, as if to restore the world’s balance, Calley stole a hen from the yard of a farm they were passing. They cooked it in the dusk, somewhere between Hereford and Ludlow, then spent the night with their backs against trees. As the embers of the fire died down so the light fell from their faces. Owl hoot, fox scream. A smear of stars. Calley with the gun across his knees. Medina remembering the touch of water.
THREE
11
So began his days with the old man. The house was a house but also just the land heaped up—the walls scraped together by giant hands, the roof something birds might have built, the floor a small field of packed earth. Various dogs that were perhaps the same dog. Various cats likewise. As for the old man he was a song that came and went. He had his bed in a kind of cupboard, its open side a heavy curtain that at night, drawn, muffled the singing, and in the morning, drawn back, released it into the room again.
Now We Shall Be Entirely Free Page 16