The First of July (30 page)

“Why did my mother die? Was she ill? Was it an accident?”

“My dear boy, it was God’s will. But I shall take you to the nuns. They can tell you all about her end. But first, a restorative?”

“No. Please. I want to know about my mother.”

The priest, whom he remembered as so voluble, seemed to have little to say now. He looked tired and old. His cassock was fraying and dusty.

“My mother—” Jean-Baptiste began.

“The nuns will tell you.”

The convent had always struck him as a miserable place, even before old Godet’s accusations. A high flint wall hid all but its steep roof. He had peered at the orphans through padlocked gates from time to time. The village children liked watching one particular strange boy who made animal noises and flapped his hands. He dribbled too, and once he’d taken his trousers off and waggled his private parts and all the village girls had squealed. A nun came out, furious, slapping the boy with both hands and shouting at his audience. Later, when Jean-Baptiste was in Paris, he went to the Menagerie and realized that watching the idiot boy was a bit like seeing animals in the zoo.

It hadn’t changed. But this time, he and the priest passed through the gate and rang the bell of the great door. After a long and silent pause, it opened. A young maid in drab dress and apron listened while Father Lefroy explained that they had come to see the Mother Superior. They stood in the hall, gazing at the portrait of some violent martyrdom. Eventually a nun appeared, looking flustered, and they followed her down a corridor, her coif nearly brushing the ceiling. Despite the sunshine outside, it was very dark, and Jean-Baptiste became aware again of the distant explosions.

She ushered them into a room where a middle-aged nun, with a bony face and raw red hands clasped in front of her, was standing waiting for them. “Father?” she said, in a irritated tone of voice and then, looking to Jean-Baptiste, nodded.

“Jean-Baptiste Mallet. The boy wants to know about his mother,” the priest said.

The nun looked weary. “Madame Mallet,” she said with the emphasis on Madame. Her look was not of sympathy but of calculated indifference, somehow tinged with pleasure, Jean-Baptiste thought.

“Your mother,” she said, “was brought here for her confinement.”

He didn’t understand. Why had his mother been confined? What had she done that made Father Lefroy look embarrassed and the nun look stern?

The priest interrupted. “The midwife was delivering two other babies. The doctor had left to join the Army, and the elderly physician who replaced him was unwell. So she was brought here when things became—difficult.”

“It was a complicated delivery and unfortunately she succumbed, although not before receiving final unction,” said the Mother Superior, and she dipped her head toward the priest.

His heart was pounding and he hated the fact that his cheeks were on fire and that he had an audience watching his every reaction to this enormous news.

“The child survived,” the nun said, and this time he was sure her tone was one of regret. “He has been here ever since. Your brother is now nineteen months old and surprisingly healthy.”

His brother. A brother. His mother had had a baby. Another lurch as he realized the father must be Vignon. He was torn between wanting to run out of this grim place to somewhere where he could take in all that she had told him, and wanting to see the child.

“Well?” the nun said.

“What is his name?”

“Leo,” she said.

He must have looked surprised. “He was born in November, on the feast of St. Leo,” said the priest. He lowered his voice. “Your poor mother succumbed the following day.”

“She had lost too much blood,” the nun said, curtly.

Standing there with a single shaft of sunlight cutting a diagonal line across the floor, he had a sudden vision of blood. Not the blood he had seen everywhere in the last two years, but that of his father. In his memory, his gaze traveled once more from the soles of his father’s boots up to the red halo spreading outward from his dark head as it lay in his mother’s lap, staining her white apron. And he heard again the screaming—not at the end, as she was cradling his father’s body in her arms, but as he hit her and as he fell down the stairs.

And then, years afterward, there was Vignon. Kind, clever, fastidious, full of stories—not all of them true. Smelling of violets and reciting poetry. Had Vignon known he was a father, or had he, too, left her, never knowing his fate?

“Now I’d like to see my brother,” he said.

“He’ll be asleep,” said the nun, dismissively. “It’s hardly convenient.”

Father Lefroy looked anxiously from her to Jean-Baptiste, nodding his head as if hoping he might be seen to agree with both of them.

“All the same,” Jean-Baptiste said, “I wish to see him.”

Benedict, France,
July 1–2, 1916

T
HEO WAS WHIMPERING IN HIS
sleep. He lay on his back in his gray undershirt and drawers, one arm thrown back, his hand loosely closed, his stubble dark against his white skin. Benedict watched his chest rise and fall, each exhalation seeming to catch briefly. The fingers of Theo’s bad hand hung over the edge of the iron bedframe. His leather jacket, gloves, balaclava, and boots had been discarded on the floor, and his bottle of Macallan, the top off, was just within reach. Benedict reached down, picked up Theo’s drooping arm, and laid it across his chest. The hand was cool, the scar from the lost finger and the puckered one up his forearm quite healed and neat. He touched the web of ivory ridges very gently with his finger. Then he turned the hand and, with a single finger, stroked the tributaries of blue veins running under the fine skin of Theo’s inner wrist. The fingers opened very slightly, but Theo slept on.

He stood there for a second, remembering Theo’s long fingers moving over the notes or reaching to pull out or depress a stop, his feet in control of the pedals, his face utterly focused. Yet it was aeroplanes that had given Theo a happy war; and despite fear, discomfort, horror, Theo had survived. To be near him was, briefly, to share his armor of euphoria.

Benedict had a swig of the whiskey before putting the cap back on, then made up one of Theo’s powders. The liquid stung his mouth ulcers, but he swilled it around his mouth, hoping it might be some kind of cure for the pain and nausea of his broken arm. He was very thirsty, but he lay on his back next to Theo on the bedstead, gazing through the hole in the roof as the threads of clouds and smoke blew away and the stars came out, while the noise, which had become part of him, rumbled and crashed and wailed like a departing storm.

When he opened his eyes, it was morning. Theo, his uniform, and the bottle were gone. Benedict was due at H.Q. at 1000 hours, and he thought he could probably get that far and have his wound dealt with properly. He got up, feeling abominably weak. There were bloodstains where he had been lying, but the bandage seemed to be dry. He needed a bath, he thought, and looked for a paper spill to light the Primus stove. He picked up some torn paper from under the discarded bottles in the long-dead cottage hearth. It seemed to have been a letter, and he could see at once that it was in Theo’s strange new handwriting. While his mind was still casting about for some justification for looking at a discarded private letter, he was already starting to read it. While the water was coming to the boil, he walked outside. What he was reading was more of a journal entry, but by a Theo who had become a stranger.

We were on the first patrol today—those parasols—sometimes they’re clumsy things, but I felt like a great bird soaring among others of my family. In all that chaos and death, the people having fled, their animals having gone or perished, the birds stayed—thrushes, skylarks, blackbirds singing their hearts out. And I was privileged to see what no man was born to see—the map unfolding beneath me, the whole salient with its fields and hills, marshes and forests, traversed by trenches, blown apart by man, the fine threads of rivers running like veins and blocked with death. Yet where we would all cease to be, in an hour or a week or in half a century, this would all return. Oxen would pull the plow, trees would bear blossom in spring, fruit in autumn, enough villagers would return to repair their violated cottages, women would hang linen on a line, priests cling to a faith undented by shrapnel, uncorrupted by gas. The river would flow clean and fill with fish. But now it was as if, having become a bird, I was transported into a dark fairytale. Giants walked the earth, the pounding of their footsteps reverberating horribly. Banshees wailed, and silver razor rain fell incessantly. There were no princesses in towers: the towers were long shattered and the briars around them barbed metal. I flew on, higher, 4,000 feet. I was seeing the greatest unleashing of power man had ever created, in a machine that could itself, like God, deal death from above, and then, after dawn, I turned south and saw a world end as even that land ceased to exist.

The earth seemed to rise into a hill, so slowly that it was if I were giddy, and I probably blinked, assuming it was my eyes that were seeing wrongly, but then the hill burst with pressure from its very core, a sheet of light flashed and the ground came up to meet me, fast, for a second I thought I’d misjudged it and yet I exulted to think my end would be part of something so magnificent; there was nothing like it since God first created the earth and man upon it. It was almost an act of blasphemy, that we should hurl this world back at him. For the air itself developed an extraordinary force and my little plane rocked in the mightiness of its thrust as a beautiful column of earth and trees and men rose and went on rising upward and then, after a long moment’s suspension, fell back on itself, forming a ring of dust moving ever outward and, when it cleared, beneath it a bright, new-born crater of chalk, innocent, pristine. A grave or a womb?

But then, as he turned the page over, it was as if, in the next few lines, Theo had caught him red-handed.

Oh Ben, what have we seen? How can we ever return from it? If this should ever come to an end are we doomed to go on for ever, longing to return, longing for just one second more of this exquisite terror? This cleansing of the world? How can I speak of it at home, what can I say to Agnes? Who is Agnes? Who am I? How can I talk of poetry, hear music, or make the right noises when she shows me her pressed flowers, or tells me of the Mission or her father’s elevation or her mother’s nerves? After today I am done with that. Marriage, obligation, nations—all exploded into nothingness.

There were meteor showers this last week—natural wonders, Ben, that man has gazed at in awe since time began, and we saw nothing because we were blowing the sky apart, showing God what man could do without him.

Benedict let his arm drop. The last sentence seemed to combine elation with despair, and the writing traveled upward along the line, the letters becoming successively wider and less finished. He had never known a Theo who wrote like this, never thought him capable of such thoughts. Yet he was overwhelmed with misgivings.

He turned to the Primus, where the water had nearly boiled dry, and did a poor job of shaving without a mirror. Dabbed blood spots off his chin and looked around for his boots. But all the busying about had not distracted him enough, and he picked up Theo’s letter, if that’s what it was, and turned it over. His heart sped up. There was only one further short paragraph:

Oh Ben, patient Ben, who suffers for others, who can be so quietly angry at my awe, and, yes, sometimes delight, in destruction and my fascination with the means by which we ensure it. Loyal Ben, who knows me to be a liar and a thief and a boaster, who has seen me behave like a beast, and still loves me. You are wasted out there in the dry desert of lost faith because you would make such a very good Christian—of the quieter, more pacific sort, the turn-a-cheek sort. Ben, stay with me, I shall need a friend, a warrior-companion who was with me at the beginning and at the end of the world. Then we won’t be alone with it all. We can go forward together.

And then, more neatly, the old Theo suddenly reappeared: “Don’t worry, old chap. I haven’t gone off my rocker.” Below these few startling sentences there was the usual small drawing; this time the tiny aeroplane had feathery wings and its nose pointed upward. These were musical notes drawn in the cloud below it: e, d, c, f, e, d, f. He smiled, and the tension slipped away to be replaced by warmth.

“O, for the Wings of a Dove,” Mendelssohn’s anthem from Psalm 55.

For a few seconds Benedict sensed his heart beating erratically, and his cheeks burned even as he knew Theo’s were the fleeting thoughts and emotions of fatigue and hunger and fear, not helped by alcohol and the contents of the medicine chest. Despite himself, he read the page again, yet with more apprehension than the first time. Theo had shown him a future, and all he needed was to trust and be brave: was that it? Was he missing something? His brain moved slowly, perhaps from loss of blood; his arm throbbed.

He heard someone coming: footsteps moving heavily and fast toward the house.

“Captain Chatto, sir. You need to come. There’s been an accident, sir.” The soldier hadn’t even paused to knock but had burst into the room, apparently not registering the officer’s state of semi-dress.

“One of ours, sir, it’s come down. Just returning, sir, it’s on the field and smoking.”

Benedict frowned. “Our what?” He imagined some unexploded missile aimed at the enemy had failed and was now threatening to blow them all to kingdom come.

“A plane, sir. And he’s moving. And it’s like to catch fire. Two lads say he’s alive but his leg’s caught. They’ve gone for a surgeon.” The soldier’s eyes showed that he knew that this meant they would amputate a limb to get the man out. And they both knew the plane would have gone up long before then. “But the smoke’s getting worse and Sergeant Laughton pulled them back.”

When Benedict made no response, the soldier looked at him, uncomprehendingly at first and then, seeing his blood-soaked arm, said, with less certainty, “Are you all right, sir? I thought you’d want to come, you see.”

Benedict sat to pull on his boots with his good hand and the soldier added: “Seeing as it’s Captain Dawes-Holt, sir.”

He froze for a second.

“No,” he said. “No.” Theo shouldn’t be flying at all. “Captain Dawes-Holt? Are you sure?”

“Yes, sir. He was up first thing yesterday, saw them blow up the ridge. Said he was off to test the machine now, sir. Running ragged, he said, but told Sergeant Laughton he’d been too close to the mines when they blew them and the balance was off.”

Then he was up and pushing past the soldier, his tunic still unbuttoned. His clumsy steps turned into a run; he held his bad arm in his good one and stumbled on uneven ground. He ran on. A single shell whined and burst to his left; he heard its bright greenness edged with orange. He ran on without his usual instinctive ducking down. One of three soldiers saluted—he noticed they were dirty and one had a bandaged hand. His chest hurt. And then he saw it. Behind some broken trees. A mean stretch of what had once been meadowland. The plane was nose-down, almost comical with its tail up and one wing broken. But he saw this through fingers of smoke, which came and went. White smoke mostly, but as he drew closer he could see more ominous darker billows.

“We need a fire chain,” he said as the soldier caught up. “Tell the NCO.”

“We tried, sir. Shell’s broken the pipe. The sappers are at it now. We only got the stream and a bit of fire water. In the tank. Sar’nt says we’re not to go too close.”

He could hear shouting as well as crackling now. What the devil was the sergeant thinking of? Men were running up the bank with individual buckets, but it was going to be hopeless. They needed to get Theo out. He reached a small zinc cistern; buckets were almost thrown into it, clanging in sparks of pink and blue against the side, and the opaque water gathered up and spilled as each soldier ran to the flames. But it was too slow; almost worse in its pointlessness than nothing.

“Tonge thought he was moving, sir, a few minutes ago.” Hall was at his side. “Just for a minute when the smoke cleared enough to see him. He must have had a problem with the rig because he can only just have took off. He wasn’t hit,” he added, as if it were relevant. “He just went up high and came down like a bird as been shot. Clipped the trees.”

He almost pushed him away. Then he smelled more than smoke at exactly the second that the significance of Hall’s words hit home and he understood why the sergeant was holding them back. If he’d only just taken the plane up, it would be full of fuel.

Now that he was closer, he could feel the heat and see the thickening oily clouds and, on the ground, more debris and the flicker of small flames. Hall and the sergeant caught up with him as he hesitated.

“Where’s the bloody M.O.?” he said to the NCO.

“They’ve got thousands of casualties. They’re overwhelmed. We’re trying to find an orderly.”

“An orderly?” He could hear his own voice rise, its desperation. The smell was nauseating. He moved forward and was halted by the heat. He ducked, brushed a spark off his shoulder. Bits of burnt canvas blew in the air. A handful of soldiers, some with buckets, were standing back, hands raised to protect their eyes from the heat. There was a piercing purple haze of metallic crackling in his head. A noise: almost perfectly B minor.

He heard the sergeant say to Hall, quietly and all in a rush, “Sooner it all goes up, the better.”

When the sergeant realized he’d heard, he said “Sorry, sir. I know he’s your friend, sir, but it’s hopeless if he can’t get hisself out.”

The pain consumed him. He burned—he felt blisters and his scalp a halo of fire, his eyeballs sucked dry, he felt his flesh melt like candle wax, but looked down to see that he was untouched.

“Dear God, Theo… .”

And then he was moving and, feeling someone’s hand on his arm for a second, shook the man off and he understood it all. Said or read or thought Theo’s unspoken words, not Mendelssohn’s music, but the Psalm itself and all its truth.

My heart is sore pained within me and the terrors of death are fallen upon me. Fearfulness and trembling are come upon me, and horror hath overwhelmed me. And I said, O that I had wings like a dove! For then would I fly away, and be at rest.

He began to run; although he felt a tug on his arm, he shook it off.

“Don’t you understand—I love him,” he said, and then shouted “I love him,” and he could feel his eyes weep with the smoke. Then it was hotter than ever, as his feet pressed hard downward and fast and the rainbow of war colors and smells hurled around him and the everything was alight and the wreck wailed and he heard a shout, “Wait for me,” and perhaps it was Hall but then he knew it for his own transparent voice shouting. Wait. Theo. Wait. And he felt first a terrible pain and his body curled away instinctively, shoulder up, arm across his face to ward off the fire, but then he was through and going forward with ringing in his ears, a pounding, his face stiffening, somehow growing smaller while his chest seemed to balloon outward. He had a white-hot vision of his lungs, their delicacy perfectly illuminated, but then came surprise as the colors went out and then the sound died and he was for the first time free of it all and he was not running, he was flying and his legs were not his and he cried with sealed eyes and lips that would not move toward the heat and the heart. Fly away. Fly, Theo, fly. And he was carried forward—not alone—never alone—and his arms so wide and feathers from them now and he was in snow: white and black and very cold and shouting out I love you I love you I love you I love