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  But this doesn’t answer the future, which is already beginning to tug. He knows he should move, that he shouldn’t wait for the soldier to be missed. He visualises the effort of rising on his elbows, of drawing his knees up to take his weight, and remains snorting in the heat while the morning races on. Flies suck his sweat. Is it time to give in? To confess everything? It has the feeling of an easy path. Confess and repent. He can imagine her devastation. She can’t love a man who hasn’t the gumption to protect himself, or her. No, before he can return to camp he must cover his tracks. Bury the corpse. But he feels the hard ground against his face and knows it’s impossible. Digging would take an age. What is needed is something quick, something that won’t exhaust him. Sink the body in the dam. Drag it deep into the rose-plot. Two or three suitable spots leap to mind, all far from the road where there would be little possibility of the body being found, at least not for weeks.

  Hauling himself upright, he’s dazed and light-headed, and vaguely hopeful too. He re-experiences the impact of the hammer and for the first time it doesn’t seem a terrible thing. He reasons that so early in the morning it is unlikely that the widow’s son was there to observe him. He might return to Rouen; give himself up; tell them he has lived hard in the fields these last two months. They can have him for desertion, and in jail or wherever they send him he’ll be out of the picture. This country is littered with unidentifiable bones. The truth is he might go free and unscathed, if he chooses. But this is the dubious part, because he knows he can’t be sure of himself from moment to moment. So he moves now, uncertain of how much time he’s squandered, and lumbers back to the barn to shift the soldier, whom he prays is good and dead. He could not bring himself to drag a breathing man a hundred yards through a thorny tangle, dump him like a pile of butcher’s refuse and come away free and unscathed. A corpse, yes, but not a human being. After rounding the glasshouses he approaches the stained bricks. Something catches in his throat. He stands staring at the congealed blood. There are fresh liquid marks where the surface-skin has been torn away – large boot prints. And through the open doorway, certainly more open than before, there is nothing to see. Panic-stricken, he jumps back into the open, alert and braced to fight, though commonsense says the soldier can’t possibly present a threat. The yard is quiet and still. He examines the bloody boot prints, the semi-circular heels at first distinct then fading. The trail vanishes well before it reaches the front gate. He imagines he would have heard if someone had come to the soldier’s assistance. Probably out on the road, staggering or long-since collapsed. He slips through the gate and looks in both directions. Nothing. He crosses to the poplars, searching amid the dry grass and saplings. Again nothing. Returning to the hedges, he takes a stick and parts the hawthorns. He eases into the low boughs and wriggles through the gloom. Animal trials, the smell of fox, but no soldier, and though he’s discouraged he’s also relieved because he doesn’t know what he would do if he did find him – revive and comfort him? Haul him away into the obscurity of the roses?

  Yet he keeps searching, pushing through the thicket close to the front wall of the barn then emerging once more into light. Confronted with the oceanic tangle of the rose-fields, the canes and foliage heaving, the mocking sweetness in his nostrils, he concedes the hopelessness of finding him. He has given him too much of a start. Clearly he is resilient. A broken skull! A shilling-sized hole in his head! How can he get up and walk away? But if he’s managed to drag himself in here, if he’s sprawled somewhere in the shadows, he’s as good as gone. Quite possibly already dead. How long before he begins to stink? The thought is disgusting. He aches for a dark place of his own. His thighs quiver and he finds himself ducking and sidling, then on the brink of flight. If not for the mademoiselle he would certainly run – put a distance between himself and this mess. The further the better. Another town. Ideally Paris, where he might loll about in a bar and grin with happy-go-lucky innocence when the Red Caps come to pick him up.

  But even if this were possible, even if he were capable of travelling so many miles without help, he can’t let her come back to an empty house, gendarmes at the door. He has to forewarn her. Leave her with a fighting chance. Briefly he brims with sweet nobility. If he hadn’t killed a man he might think of it as love.

  It’s not until after midday that his desire to prepare and preserve her amounts to a scheme. After repeatedly sweeping the hedges and blundering back and forth along the more accessible furrows between the roses, after going two and three times over old ground and finding nothing, he returns indoors. He guesses he has three or four hours before she’s due. More thoroughly than before he scrutinises each room for evidence of their co-habitation. In the kitchen he endeavours to recreate the austerity he glimpsed on that first night. One cup. One bowl. A single saucepan suspended over the fireplace. He rucks the bed as if it has been slept in, tosses her navy blue workskirt casually over the chair. He sweeps boot prints from the back step, lest some might be identifiable as his. Likewise the scuffed marks along the dog-leg hall. He spruces up the salon furniture, dusting the ragged chairs and scraping the congealed candle wax from the little walnut table. He wipes the greasy fingermarks from the wine decanters and realigns the certificates and medals of horticultural merit – all so his mademoiselle will appear in a good light, a conscientious retainer of the household.

  Then he must wait. He waits though he would be better gone, every minute exacerbating his doubts. He goes outside to squat on the pathway between the glasshouses where he has a clear view of the bricked yard and front gate. His attention flickers between the vibrancy of the pink roses and the dark stain on the bricks. His ears hum with insects or blood or the fear that all his measures will achieve nothing. He doesn’t like to think of the soldier. He tries to keep to matters that are ascertainable. Roses. Sunshine. Geese rioting on the dam. But inevitably he hears the soldier gasping his accusations to a third person. The unlikelihood doesn’t matter. It’s there in his head. Only with an unexpected surge of will can he turn to more realistic and manageable alternatives. If the soldier lies dead – dead and unseen – maybe he has a chance. He will explain and Colombe will see with her own eyes. They will put their heads together. And after he’s gone, after two or three days, she will report the disturbing stain in her yard and the cap in her barn, and because she has been away in the city, working, she will be in no way associated with whatever incident they eventually conclude has taken place. Even if they find the body, how is she implicated?

  As for him, the picture is less clear. He will not attempt to reach Paris. He will return to Rouen. If he can be found in the vicinity of the railway station he might plausibly claim to have spent these past months in the capital. He will crawl back into his old skin. He will hold tenaciously to his story.

  It is then that he remembers the widow and her son. It is like plunging into unbreathable air, the old cycle of futile thoughts: How much have they seen? How much do they know?

  Yet he also asks: Why should they report the existence of a foreign deserter? Is it possible to bet on their apathy?

  One thing is certain: if a dead soldier is found, that would be the end.

  thirty

  From the clump of poplars opposite the house he watches a dot moving in the pastures. The spires of the city cathedral poke up above the forest in a late afternoon haze that seeps along the horizon. Sweeping clouds of insects rise from the drying grasses, flushed out by marauding birds. The dot several times vanishes into hollows or merges with vegetation before becoming a woman, dark and squat. Not until he sees her climb up onto a diversion bank and look back, shielding her eyes from the low sun, is he sure it’s Colombe. When she turns again he steps decisively out from the poplars to give her fair warning that something is wrong. At eighty yards she recognises him. He can see her bunched frown. Her stride quickens and he withdraws into the saplings. Then she’s on him, brushing aside his inarticulate hands. Her voice is an urgent w
hisper, as unintelligible as ever. He realises he’s been relying on her intuition, on a mythical female omniscience. She examines his face with obvious consternation and distress, running her fingers over what he quickly realises is dried blood.

  ‘Moi non,’ he tells her. ‘Le soldat.’ Yes, the soldier. Dead. ‘Il est mort.’

  ‘Le soldat? Où?’

  Where? Good question. He grasps at her wrist but she refuses to be led. Shaking free, she listens for travellers on the road then moves out in front. The open barn alerts her. She can hear her geese on the dam. Then she sees the stained bricks. Her look of horror is brief but profound and she turns to him gibbering in such rapid French he’s soon exasperated. Why does she persist? He pulls back the door to its furthermost extent, wedging it open so she can see the crumpled gander. She lifts her skirt above her ankles as she steps around the blood. He watches her mouth form a silent O as she guesses at what has happened. And then she’s interrogating him once more, an avalanche of tumbling sounds that undoubtedly signify all those questions he’s anticipated but can’t answer. Such as why? Such as what possessed him? Such as what has become of the soldier and are they safe?

  He’s prepared for her despair. It isn’t a cataclysm that can be swallowed at one gulp – down, gone, over with! She traces the blood away towards the gate and stands baffled at the last faint heel print. Then all at once she plunges into the garden and along the hedge, pushing and dragging at the foliage and peering underneath. The more he tries to restrain her, promising that it’s no use, that he’s gone over every inch, the more fiercely she searches. Then she’s over the fallen fence and out into the rows beside the house while he trails limply behind. She stops still, upright, eyes unfocused. It is as if she’s trying to catch the soldier’s scent. All Harry can smell is roses, sweet beguiling roses. What can she smell? Blood? An unwashed male body? Or perhaps she’s merely thinking, reasoning it out as he has tried so vainly to do. Either way she’s off again, pushing away from the house, back towards the dam. He follows her large bustling behind up the embankment and for a moment they stand together overlooking the black water and outraged geese. Already, even before they begin to trawl through the reeds, he feels caught out. He didn’t consider the dam. Wrong direction. And too far. But Colombe has followed the logic of it – water! water at all costs! – because here he is, a dirty red streak nestled in the sedge, bare head for all the world like a grey stone embedded in the mud. And to Harry’s astonishment the soldier breathes, deep and loudly like an aggressive sleeper. They go down on their knees, sinking, Colombe murmuring regret in the man’s mud-caked ear. He can’t be roused. His face is encased in sun-baked filth. Harry contemplates going back to the house to find something that might do as a stretcher – he could take a door off its hinges – but Colombe simply reaches under the soldier and lifts. Head and chest pull free of the sucking mud. It is as much as she can achieve alone, whereas Harry finds him light, a mere skeleton that he hauls up and spreads across his shoulder in a fireman’s lift. He tries to be gentle but has the shakes. As they tumble down the dam wall he feels the man’s head rocking against his back. And still he breathes, a little more hoarsely but without the least sign of faltering.

  Colombe selects the small servant’s bedroom a few yards from her kitchen. Harry unfolds him on the bare mattress, stretching him out on his back and manoeuvring his booted feet through the iron bed-end so he’s not crumpled and bent. But in no time they have to turn him on his side, because he barks and convulses. The air bursts up his windpipe and inflates his cheeks. He makes a sound like a horse with its nose in a chaff bag. He smells of shit. And all the while his bloodied eyes, blind as stones, are unflinchingly open and steady, giving an impression of stoicism. Colombe works at the mud and gore with a wet cloth, recreating his face, coaxing the fleshless contours and pale skin into existence. Eventually, touch by touch, she reveals a bloated mound in the hair. The wound itself is small and clotted, like a puckered mouth. It seems innocuous.

  They strip his upper body. Frail and ribby. Chest hair white as Christmas. Harry remembers his ineffectual attempt to block his blow, an absurd wave of the dead bird as the hammer struck. The man under his hands is old. Did he imagine his vitality?

  Removing his boots, Harry discovers he’s sockless. Out of modesty or discretion or plain contempt for what he’s done, Colombe leaves Harry to deal with the soldier’s proud red trousers. Penitentially, irked fingers negotiating the stinking fabric, he unbuttons and drags down. No underclothes. Shit on the mattress, shit on Harry’s hands. Which he hastily plunges into the basin Colombe has left. Then he flees to the kitchen for fresh water. Suddenly the abattoir soap smells wholesome. He slops a half pail into the trough and loiters there, scrubbing excessively, mindful of the filth between the soldier’s legs and loath to return. He hears the slap of her boots on the back step. She has a second bucket from the well and what is evidently a veterinary device, a thin rubber tube with a funnel end. She stomps straight past him into the soldier’s room. She speaks to the man quietly, prattle and goose-talk, to soothe them all. Shamed, Harry follows, soap, basin and cloth at the ready. Together they squat, Harry at the dirty end. And while he sweeps and dabs disgustedly along the man’s inner thighs she wriggles the tube down his gullet and into his stomach. Into the funnel she trickles water. Harry cleans his buttocks and between – scrotum and loose skin and difficult creases. At last he covers him with a blanket, folding it back beneath his chin as if bedding down a child. Colombe continues to trickle water. A pint or more and still she’s not satisfied. She waves Harry away – despising him less, he thinks, now that she has a resurrection to effect. He retrieves the soiled clothes and holds them at arm’s length like his unspeakable relief. She waves him away.

  He wants to believe. He is prepared to disregard the evidence of his eyes. He is susceptible to her hope and stubbornness, and feebly ashamed of his willingness to let her take command. She has a magical intent, the nursing nature he has always lacked – even when he cared for his mother. In her desire to put things right she absolves him. She takes back his killing blow. Once more death is an abstraction, threatening but not quite realised, unproven. And while Lazarus lies there waiting to rise, while Colombe proceeds in the belief it’s possible, he has his reprieve.

  There are sensible self-protective reasons why he should simply dispose of the soldier’s uniform, but that would be breaking faith. If she can bring back the dead, the least he can do is wash his clothes. But not in the kitchen trough. His sense of hygiene won’t come at that. So it’s out to the well, lugging everything in the heavy timber pail. He throws the soldier’s coat on the turf. It’s stiff and perhaps more putrid than his trousers, yet Harry lays it open, revealing the original sky blue of the lining. He fumbles through the pockets, inner and outer. Plum pips. A blood- and sputum-sodden handkerchief. No money. No inscribed pocket watch honouring Councillor Samuel Lambert. Liquidated. Turned to their not-so-daft thief’s need and advantage. It could be anywhere by now. And since Harry can’t have it back, the longer and more obscure the chain of commerce, the better. Nevertheless, he feels miserable with pessimism.

  thirty-one

  He sleeps alone, or more correctly, he does not sleep but lies alone in his moaning bed without once encroaching on her abandoned territory. He’s restrained by a curious superstition. He maintains a place for her, as if he might preserve their common lives. In the night he hears occasional noises from downstairs, the scrape of her chair, a stray word that tells him she is still keeping vigil beside the stranger. But mostly he hears her silence. He wonders at it. He’s intrigued. Twice before retiring, an hour apart, he poked his nose in and was embarrassed by their stillness. It was a sort of communion. Did she suppose the soldier was capable of sensing she was there? He couldn’t sit with them. Yet he admires her resolution. He doesn’t want the soldier to die by himself. He hates the bleakness of that smug Biblical wisdom about coming into and out o
f the world alone.