The First of July (29 page)

The room had once been the schoolmaster’s dining room. It still had the same brown wallpaper, now with light patches where the pictures had once hung. A grimy lace curtain drooped at the window. A large table had been placed diagonally across a corner, its surface completely covered with maps and papers topped with an overflowing ashtray.

“I am Captain Bartram,” said the officer once he had sat down. “And you are?”

“Trooper Mallet, sir,” he said. “One of your men is injured, just across the river. He needs help. Quickly.”

For a second he watched the British officer’s serious face. The man was not French, but he spoke French like a Parisian.

“Commendable. But there is a war on and you are dressed, more or less, like a soldier.”

“I’ve been discharged. I was injured. I have come to see my mother. She lives here. In Corbie.”

His hand went up and touched his ribs. “And then I had—I
have
—a disease. Of the kidneys. From before, I think. I was in a hospital and then on a barge, but Dr. Vignon said that as we were near my home, I could leave.”

The officer looked thoughtful.

“Do you have permission to leave your regiment? Do you have papers?”

“Yes. Well, no.” Jean-Baptiste felt in his pockets. He must have swayed, because the officer got up, held him by his elbow, and guided him to a chair; then he went to the door and shouted down the corridor.

“They’ll bring you some tea,” he said.

Jean-Baptiste’s fingers were trembling as he pulled out the papers from his wet trousers, the envelope lying in his hand like little more than a slab of porridge.

“I was in the river,” he said.

“Unfortunate,” the captain said. “The water seems to have dissolved your alibi.”

Jean-Baptiste nodded miserably. He had been so careful, but it was as the schoolmaster had told him long, long ago: the river could never be trusted. It could scour a bank away, pour over the fields, drowning whatever lay in its way: a package of paper was nothing.

Suddenly the officer asked him: “Are you a deserter?”

“No, sir. I served at Verdun and was commended, and then I was injured. They thought I would die.”

The officer looked almost sad. “I’m afraid plenty of deserters have given honorable service before they decide they have given enough.”

He got up, walked over to Jean-Baptiste, and picked up his wrist. For a second he thought the captain was going to take his pulse, but he simply turned his identity bracelet around. “Well,” he said, reading it, “at least that seems to agree on who you are.”

There was a knock on the door. An orderly came in with a mug and a plate of bread. Jean-Baptiste had been ravenous earlier, but now his appetite had gone. He picked up the solid mug, almost too hot to hold, and drank. He had never tasted tea, but it was the British national drink and he had no wish to offend the officer. It was terrible—bitter-sweet with an oily surface and the color of chestnuts—but he drank a little more and felt it spread its warmth through his body.

Then he remembered his other mission and put the mug down.

“Sir, the soldier,” he said. “He’s at Monsieur Godet’s farm. I mean, it’s ruined now, but it
was
his. It’s just over the river. Up from the island. Up from Robisart’s factory. He’s injured. Quite badly, I think. I tried to help.”

The captain picked up his pen.

“A British soldier?” he said.

“Yes. He is with bicycles. He had a bicycle. On his arm—a stag.” He could feel himself tapping his own arm to demonstrate where the badge was, nodding like an idiot, to emphasize his words. The captain nodded back.

“He might be asleep, but he might be unconscious.”

The captain stood up a second time. This time the bristled sergeant came to the doorway. He was like a great hog, Jean-Baptiste thought. He and the captain exchanged words.

“My sergeant thinks it could be a trap,” the captain said, turning to Jean-Baptiste. “If it’s the building we’re thinking of, it’s within range of the guns. We have thousands of casualties already.”

“No,” Jean-Baptiste said, surprised at how much he wanted them to find their wounded countryman. “Please. He is hurt. He will die if nobody goes. His name is Isaac, I think. I said I’d send someone.” He felt in his pocket and brought out the disc.

The captain turned the identity disc over in his hand.

“It has been a very bad day,” he said and looked somber. “We are only beginning to find out how bad. I don’t have time for this. My sergeant would quite like to see you shot, just to save time.” There was a hint of a smile. “So I hope you aren’t giving him any reason to press his case. My own thoughts are that quite enough men have died today already.”

“No, sir. I just said to the cyclist that I’d get help.” Then he added: “But I don’t know if he could understand me.”

“All right.” The officer’s attention seemed to flag. “We’ll see in good time anyway. Usually we’d simply hand you back to your own people, let them sort it out. But even you can’t have missed the fact that we’re in the middle of a major action.” He waved vaguely to indicate a world that they both knew existed not far from this room.

Jean-Baptiste nodded.

“I’m not risking men we don’t have just to take you south. Of course, we could lock you up.” He stopped, walked to the hall door. Turned. “Where does your mother live?”

Jean-Baptiste felt faint hope.

“Here,” he said. And when the officer looked surprised, he added “A hundred meters from here. On the edge of town.”

“Right. Here’s what we’ll do. I’ll have a medical orderly look you over and see if your story holds up.”

“Sir, thank you. Thank you.”

The orderly made a face at the sight of his scars. Put one hand behind and one in front of the tender area beneath his ribs and squeezed. Jean-Baptiste gasped. The officer looked up and waved the orderly away, but Jean-Baptiste kept ahold of the man’s arm.

“Please,” he said. “Please go to Godet’s farm. On the other side of the river. No distance at all. One of your men is there—he will die. I put the solution the doctor gave me on his wound. His bicycle was stuck into his stomach.”

The orderly looked up, though he made no attempt to pull free. He gave Jean-Baptiste a blank look and then turned to the officer. After a few seconds, the captain spoke to him in his own language, and the man replied. The orderly looked at Jean-Baptiste as though assessing what kind of man he was dealing with. The tone of his conversation with the officer sounded like a series of questions and answers. The orderly patted Jean-Baptiste on the back.

The officer said “The first-aider confirms injuries to your kidneys. For now you can go home. And he is willing to try to find your patient. He has volunteered. So now it’s up to God and Higgs. Here’s some paper and a pencil. I want you to draw me a simple map of the farm. Then write your address down. Then you may go.” He sat down and returned to his papers, looking deathly tired.

“Thank you,” Jean-Baptiste said, as much for the cyclist as himself.

It was strange taking the usual road toward his mother’s house, but when the lane curved and he finally caught sight of his former home, the upper windows were roughly boarded up. Soldiers in shirtsleeves sat on pallets in what was now just a yard, where she had once grown vegetables.

He slowed down, trying to make sense of it. She must be staying with friends in the town. It was not so strange; it was already clear that houses in Corbie had been commandeered by the British soldiers. But how would he find her?

For the first time, the enormity of what he had done back in 1914 hit him. He had abandoned her. It was a much bigger sin than anything his mother had done. It was not his fault the Germans had come, but she would have guessed he had gone to fight and would never have known whether he was alive or dead. He felt his face twitching. Maybe with every bit of news, every French defeat or ferocious battle, she would have wondered. Was her boy alive or dead or horribly mutilated? He blinked hard and swallowed with difficulty. This was the house where she had given birth to him, where she might have read his letters and been comforted. If he had sent her any. It was here that she had sat when he had gone away and, later, when Vignon had gone too. And what did her neighbors think of a woman whose son left her without a good-bye?

He walked to the edge of the low wall. None of the men in the garden looked up. He didn’t know what to do. He took a deep breath, and it set his cough off. He had to wipe his mouth with the back of his hand. The sun was in his eyes and he squinted to the bedroom windows. Then somebody tapped him on the arm, their approach so quiet he jumped.

“Jean-Baptiste?” It was Madame Petitbon. She had been old when he had been a child, and she seemed not much older now. She wore the remnants of traditional local dress, and her lips had disappeared into the cavern of her mouth.

“Is it you? My poor boy,” she said. “Poor child.”

She looked down at his bare feet, puzzled. He found himself struggling not to be overwhelmed by emotion. Somebody had welcomed him.

“We all thought you were dead,” she said, reaching up and stroking his arm.

He shook his head.

“And grown so tall. And a soldier?”

“Injured,” he said, his voice ragged. He wanted to touch her in return. “My mother?” He willed himself to ignore the expression on her face. “My mother must have gone?”

She was silent, her black eyes never leaving him. “My poor lad,” she said in the end. Her hand reached out again. Then, wearily, “She’s gone, yes. Gone to our Lord and his blessed mother and all the angels. Nearly two years ago now.”

The muscles of his face were pulling it in directions he couldn’t control. For a few minutes he could think of nothing to say. “My mother,” he said, finally.

After a few more minutes, he said “Why? She wasn’t old.” And then without meaning to, he said “Why?” again, like a small child.

“She died with the nuns,” the old woman said and pulled her gray shawl around her, her eyes sliding away from him. “She was not a bad woman. Always a good neighbor.” She patted him on the arm a few times. Then she took his hand in her tiny dry one. “She always missed you,” she said. “She’ll be looking down, glad you came home.”

But what home
was
there? No mother, no house, the town full of the British and at war? Now tears filled his eyes. He screwed them tightly shut but still felt tears escape.

“Talk to the nuns,” she said. “Talk to Father Lefroy. He buried her. November ’14. Leaves everywhere. Cold. She’s in the churchyard.” Her face brightened. “You can go and see her, tell her all about it. No cross there, but she’s on the right near the gate. Next to old Godet.” He felt her move away and looked up to see her shuffle off across the road.

He wiped his face on his sleeve again. It was filthy. He was filthy. And it had all been for nothing. He might as well have gone back to fight. Vignon hadn’t known, and the thought of Vignon’s act tightened around his heart. She’d died only months after he’d left. She had looked well, seemed so strong, but perhaps he had never really looked at her? At least she had never heard of Verdun, of the losses and the lives of daily horror. She never had to imagine that or imagine him there.

He was gripped by a pain of regret that almost stopped his breath: not just his chest, but his whole body was tight and frozen, as if fingers were digging into the back of his neck, paralyzing him. He tried to stop the trembling by wrapping his arms tightly around himself, but felt dizzy and lowered himself to a squatting position. But at that moment, Madame Petitbon reappeared with Madame Laporte at her side. The older, smaller woman seemed to be supporting the raw-boned, black-frocked Madame Laporte, who held out a pair of well-worn sabots.

“My Lucien’s,” she said. “He won’t be needing them.”

He leaned against a wall; there was a faint smell of baking bread. Out of nowhere, there was his mother making him a bowl of hot chocolate for breakfast on his saint’s day. He thought that had been before his father died, before times got harder though happier. The memory of her patching his blue school pinafore, of her watching him from the doorstep, the doorstep just across the street, as he walked to classes: the same route he had just taken. Keeping him safe. Another image hit him, each one like a blow. Perhaps the last time he saw her before Vignon. Before it happened. She was squinting as she read a book, leaning toward the oil lamp. Now he thought it was a new book. Remembering the poetry he’d found in the doctor’s boat, he wondered whether Vignon had given it to her. She had been the only daughter of the mayor’s chief clerk in Amiens, and she had been properly taught to read and write. Her favorite cousin had married a rich Englishman, she’d told him when he was a boy. It was then that he’d gotten it in his mind to row to England and find her.

His mother had once told him that her parents had tried everything they could to prevent her marrying his father. “Oh, but he was so handsome,” she’d say, “such a manly man.” This was after his death, when other aspects of him could be forgotten. The day after the wedding—“Where grandemère was dressed for a funeral,” she’d said laughing—his grandfather had died of apoplexy while drafting leases for
hortillonages
on the Somme. “He fell on his big bottle of ink,” she’d said, “and ruined six months’ work, and when we saw him, the side of his face looked bruised. But it was ink, just spilled ink. The women had scrubbed and scrubbed but they couldn’t get it out. Even when they practically rubbed his skin to the bone.”

She was gone. Only he now knew these things, and he had nobody to tell. Nobody cared.

He rubbed his eye with the heel of his hand. Someone coughed. It was a priest. Looking harder, he could see it was Father Lefroy, an anxious, thinner-looking Father Lefroy. He and his mother had thought the priest rather pompous, but now he was just grateful for a familiar face. Another wave of emotion swept over him.

“My child. My child,” said Father Lefroy, putting a hand on his head as if for a blessing. His lips moved silently for a second. “A son of Corbie returned. But to a tragedy. We all thought that you were dead, and you thought your dear mother was alive. What terrible misunderstandings. What sorrow God asks us to endure.”