The Accidental Soldier Read online

  This impression of stasis, he suspects, is influenced by a photograph he carries in his wallet. Uncle Lew Broughton took it in 1903, a year before Sammy’s death. There’s a pretence of spontaneity, as if Harry and his mother are looking up suddenly at an unexpected visitor, but in reality Lew posed it carefully. While the printing process gives the light that coppery look of a dust storm, it’s nonetheless intense. Shadows are compact and dark. And the clarity is extraordinary. You can see the opal brooch on Ma’s blouse and the rose petals strewn under the bushes. And there is Harry in his sleeveless baker’s shirt, tall to the brink of ungainliness, solidly built but narrow-shouldered (like a bottle of hock, according to Lew). The exposed skin of his upper arms is pale as dough. Looking impossibly young, he bows over a rosebush. In one hand he has a harvest of flowers, in the other a knife. He likes the man in this picture. Perhaps the instinct for evasion, for wriggling and shifting, is there, but undeveloped. He has an ironic charm and self-confidence. He is a man in his element.

  Beside him at the table, Natty Mills tells the story of his sister’s wedding. He sparkles with pride when he speaks of all the good things laid out on trestles. The cake was iced with marzipan. Would they have tasted marzipan? For Mills the word is as marvellous as the flavour. Bunter is surprisingly tactful. He doesn’t belittle the glories of marzipan. He says it’s a French invention, and a French word, and embarks on an etymological exposition to demonstrate his mastery of the language.

  Harry sips his beer. He is conscious of how small things can revitalise a person. Mills has his marzipan. Harry is thinking roses. Somehow Sylvie’s little card has effected a shaky rejuvenation. He keeps it by his stretcher bed. The flower is a blotchy stain against the stippled surface, the last image he sees at night, the first in the morning – a charm, a memento of the impossible stasis of his dreams. It won’t last. It can’t last. But it’s better to have something.

  Having inherited his father’s sticky and obsessive mind, he knows as much as there is to know about Mademoiselle Elise. She dates from the mid-60s. She was named for the breeder’s infant daughter. But what sets him humming with intention is a phrase from an old catalogue – ‘the famed Cordier establishment at Montigny, convenient to Rouen’.

  He sips his beer and plans an expedition.

  When the opportunity comes – six hours’ leave on a witheringly cold Sunday – he finds he must put up with Bunter. It can’t be helped. It would be an unsociable act, beyond the pale, to go off without him.

  They ride in a tram, the mist freezing into blisters on the window.

  Of course Bunter doesn’t know it’s an expedition. He has his own ideas. There are time-honoured ways for a soldier to spend his precious leave, and Bunter is both an opinionated virgin and a traditionalist. He’s for a stroll about the city, a good feed, a bottle of plonk, a woman. Not that he’s the carousing sort, swearing that in his native Footscray he’s a model of sobriety, a straight-laced solicitor’s clerk. But they’re not in Footscray, and after weeks of being confined to camp he thinks he’s owed a soldier’s pleasures.

  ‘I don’t fancy your chances,’ says Harry.

  ‘Got to know where to look,’ Bunter boasts.

  ‘It’s Sunday for Christ’s sake!’

  ‘Sunday or no Sunday.’

  Harry doesn’t believe him. He looks out at the leaden sky. Even Bunter has to concede that the day is bleak. For a minute his enthusiasm seems to fizzle. Then all at once he initiates a conversation with the woman opposite. She smiles tolerantly, though Harry suspects she finds his French incomprehensible. Bunter’s voice is louder than the rattle and clank of the tram. Other passengers avert their eyes. Harry feels implicated, damned by association, especially when the woman takes refuge behind a little pamphlet.

  ‘They love it,’ Bunter murmurs in his ear. He subscribes to the theory that French women are everything that Australian women aren’t – informal, unshockable, greedy for sex with strangers. It’s a common enough theory in camp, but Bunter is undeniably a cockhead. Harry has been thinking in such terms for months and is no longer surprised. Good blokes and cockheads. Then there are mugs. He suspects he might be a mug. Who else would share his leave with Bunter?

  He would prefer to be indifferent to what other men think of him. As far as he can make out he’s regarded as an accepting sort, docile and easily put upon. From the beginning he was old Harry, vaguely comic for being forty-two years of age and a peculiar specimen. He plays cards for matches but not for money – ‘Like a Methodist,’ they quip. He gives out his razor and brush, and sometimes a few shillings, and passes around the back issues of Harper’s Magazine that Lew sends from home. Whether because of his age or his height, or his expertise as a baker, or because he seems to be above the usual fray of bickering, he attracts lonely and uncertain men. It seems he reassures them. He can’t imagine a more fraudulent father-figure, though he recognises that people in need are slaves to a fixed idea. On the other hand, there is something sustaining in their conception of him. It dispels the misery of snow. It buffers him from the ugly habit of introspection.

  Through the iced glass he gets a distorted view of the city. Along the Seine the respectable citizens have abandoned the Grand Cours to foreigners: a few British but mostly straggling colonials, clots of New Zealanders, Australians and Canadians. A lucky few have female company: nurses and WAACs, and here and there a gregarious Frenchwoman. Americans are still thin on the ground, though the papers assert that they are here in numbers. Out the front of a public office a pair of black-bearded Sikhs, purplish about the lips, scurry away from an elm as the wind dislodges snow from the upper boughs. The street restaurants, having retreated indoors, are full of huddling soldiers. Occasionally, despite the clatter of the tram, he catches a phrase of feeble song, and finds himself thinking: So this is what’s on offer – eggs and chips and a miserable pretence of pleasure. His own nostalgic quest seems a world more promising.

  ‘Hey,’ he tells Bunter as if suddenly inspired, ‘what about something different? Let me see the map.’

  Bunter is instantly suspicious. ‘I know your something different. You know what you can do with your churches and museums.’

  Harry assures him he has no desire to poke about in public buildings. ‘We could go see a friend.’

  ‘What friend?’

  ‘A woman, Bunt – a woman if you can behave yourself. Mademoiselle Elise Cordier.’

  Bunter snorts dismissively. Harry couldn’t possibly know any French women. But he likes being joshed. He rises to the promise of a sham adventure.

  ‘I can’t find her without you,’ Harry tells him.

  ‘You can’t find her because she doesn’t exist.’

  Feigning hurt, Harry takes the map. The tramway ends at a place called Bapeaume. From there there’s a broken line – signifying what? a rough track? – through open fields and forest. Then they can pick up the Montigny road.

  ‘This mademoiselle, she got two heads or what?’

  ‘Mademoiselle Elise? She’s got all the essential parts, Bunter, don’t you worry.’

  At the terminus they accost the driver as he jumps down from his cabin. Harry feeds Bunter the questions. The driver is impatient and not at all helpful to them. Cordier? A rose grower in Montigny? Never heard of him.

  ‘Surprise, surprise,’ says Bunter.

  They try a gendarme. Same result. Then a woman with a whimpering child. Cordier? Un horticulteur? No, not here. There are several in Martainville, but not in Montigny. And she should know, because she has a daughter who married into the village. By now Bunter’s fed up, but Harry won’t turn back.

  The streets are a wilderness of snow: white heaps in the gutters, on the tops of walls, on the sills of exposed windows. Great cracked slabs cling to the roofs. With their papered windows and smokeless chimneys the houses have an abandoned aspect. Coal is like gold, Bunter remarks morbidly. He
reads the French papers. Says that every day some poor old duck freezes to death in her bed.

  The wind comes in whistling gusts, spattering their faces with sleet. But across the road there is a boy, apparently quite indifferent to the cold. Harry guesses he must be about twelve, and probably a bit simple, the way he drags along in the ditches kicking at ice. He wears only a light shirt and corduroy trousers, and clogs, heavy wooden clogs such as Harry has only seen in illustrated fairytales. The boy skips when he sees them. ‘Messieurs, messieurs,’ he calls rapturously. He has a bunch of raffle tickets.

  ‘Ask what the prize is.’

  Bunter obliges, rephrasing the question several times before making himself understood. ‘Coffee,’ he reports at last, not bothering to hide his scepticism. Even so, they fish in their wallets for a few coins. The boy’s very particular about taking down their names. To Harry’s horror, Bunter gives his as Napoleon. The boy doesn’t bat an eye, writing it down gravely and adding a note that Harry gathers means ‘care of the Australians’. To show him they’re not all bastards, Harry takes the butt and writes his name in full, complete with rank and enlistment number. He doubts the boy appreciates this. A sou is a sou, with or without the humiliation.

  ‘Ask if he’s heard of Monsieur Cordier.’

  ‘I’ve had a gutful of Monsieur Cordier. Ask him yourself.’

  Harry stops still. Bunter catches his look, so uncharacteristically black, and can manage only half a grin. For Harry anger is a distressing emotion, as unwelcome and mysterious as epilepsy. He holds himself tightly. He practises circumspection, remembering the pain of past eruptions – almost all concealed and bearing on no one but himself. Bunter’s grin departs in stages. He questions the boy with a sullenness that makes Harry want to swat him. The boy hasn’t heard of Cordier, but knows of a house with roses. Acres of roses. He offers to take them there.

  Nothing is said of money. He simply trots on ahead without looking back. He has an almost military step that forces them to hasten in keeping up. Before long they’re out in the blanketed steppes. After fifteen minutes’ tramping, the wagon-track joins the more substantial Montigny road and they push on through what the map describes as the upper reaches of the state forest of Roumare. Where the trees end they pass a single free-standing store, a cat squawking mutely from a window. Then on through the blinding fields. A red brick cattle byre, more fields, hedges like iced puddings. The church spire and huddled houses of Montigny are clearly visible half a mile away, but the boy takes them north, following the verge of the forest. Underfoot the way becomes a hoof-gouged cattle path. Bunter declares them lost. ‘If I aren’t the biggest fool for listening to you, Harry Lambert!’ Sensing their concern, the boy urges them on. Several times the trees open and close around them. Isolated farmhouses, their high thatched or black-tiled roofs seeming to bow under the weight of snow, loom and are left behind. Finally the boy indicates a wiry block of vegetation and the part-obscured outlines of various buildings. Harry consults the map. It seems they are somewhere in the agricultural hinterland between Montigny and Maromme. The boy would come all the way, out of curiosity, yet Harry stops him at a thicket of poplars. If he could he’d stop Bunter too. He would like better company altogether, impossible company, his deceased parents no less. He would blindfold them and whisk them past all the squalor of undeserving France to arrive here at this isolated relic of their century. He can imagine his father’s reverence. They should proceed humbly. Hats off to Monsieur Cordier, high priest of selective breeding.

  If he still exists.

  High on the brick wall of the barn is a faded sign: cordier, rosieriste.

  ‘Top class, this,’ Bunter sneers.

  Yet they emerge from the trees and walk across the road. Geese honk and racket in the buried fields. The house stands behind a brushwood fence, and banked on three sides by more than an acre of leafless, knotted and arching rose canes. There’s a gate, timber with a few flakes of ancient blue paint. It sticks and requires a kick and a heave to open. Then the path forks, left to the privacy of a bleak garden, right to the brick-paved yard. As uninvited intruders they really should knock at the front door. Harry has Sylvie’s pressed rose in the pocket of his greatcoat, brought along in the absurd belief that it might serve as an introduction. But suddenly he feels ridiculous. He leads the way into the plant nursery, which has obviously ceased to be a going concern. Never mind. As foreigners they can plead ignorance. In any case there’s no one about.

  While Bunter shivers under the eaves of the barn Harry strolls between the rectangular rosebeds. Very formal affairs, reminiscent of pictures he’s seen of the Luxembourg Gardens: a stark tree-rose at each corner, occasional arches and pillars roped with thorny canes. The dwarfs are dumped with snow, muffled mounds, a brittle stick poking through here and there. Further along terracotta pots stand in tight phalanxes, unpruned growth tangled like razor wire. Beyond this, the first of the glasshouses stands open, dark within on account of straw mats laid over the steep roof. He can see only a little of the interior: rusted steel frameworks and benches, a disused burner. Wired to the wall of the barn, a series of old climbers have braided stems as thick as his wrist. In the bare zigzag twigs he imagines he can recognise the same cultivar that tumbled over his back verandah in Rushburn – the original Mademoiselle Elise, fifty years old if she’s a day. Grasping the thornless wood, he follows the convolutions up to the extent of his reach. He remembers his father’s delighted confessions of having stolen a cutting from a swish house in Bendigo – a youthful crime, pre-Harry, when Mademoiselle Elise was the latest novelty from Europe. Yet it disturbs him to see her so bare and dishonoured by the season. It disturbs him to think she has grown old, forever a young woman, but old. Still, what did he expect?

  He decides to leave before they’re discovered. But Bunter shouts and waves up to a tiny panel of glass, a small dormer jutting out from the frosted thatch. He’s certainly observant. There is a rippling shadow. Then the glass is clear.

  Bunter goads him with a smile. So here they are! What a lark, Harry! Definitely worth the effort. Harry turns away. From behind the house comes the bang of a door. Bunter composes himself, ready to meet the face they had seen in the glass.

  What Harry notices first is that she walks with a flat-footed grip on the world. Then her big hands, and her solidity. She is sculpturally fat, bottom-heavy, compact. Her phrases are crisp and abrupt, and though he can’t understand a word it’s clear she’s not rolling out the red carpet. Bunter does his best to explain, fending off her belligerence with a series of shrugs. She has no patience with his inept French, no liking for foreigners. The nursery is shut, Bunter translates. Shut, shut. No one to run it. The men are in the army. Could they please go away.

  Harry reaches for Sylvie’s pressed rose. ‘Tell her we know Monsieur Cordier’s roses and have come to pay our respects.’

  ‘Pay our respects!’ Bunter mocks.

  ‘Tell her!’

  He addresses her with another apologetic shrug and a cocked eye at Harry. Blame him, he insists. Blame that lunatic there. The woman replies with a few curt words. Monsieur Cordier is dead. Has been for fifteen years.

  Harry tells her in English how sorry he is, and feels thoroughly stupid. Yet that doesn’t stop him bullying Bunter into pumping her further. Would she perhaps be the great man’s daughter?

  ‘Oh no mistake about that,’ Bunter assures him with vindictive pleasure. ‘She’s your girl, Harry.’

  Whether Mademoiselle Elise has any English, she can certainly recognise ridicule. Harry feels himself blush. The geese they heard when coming in seem impossibly close, their honking invading the yard though presumably they are still at a distance. Shamed, Harry turns to go.

  What would the old boy say? Poor Father! His mademoiselle so prickly and unappreciated!

  On the long trek back he is full of regrets. He shouldn’t have brought Bunter. He feels sure the woman
knew she was being laughed at. But as they tramp again through the forest he has tentative ideas of making a second trip when the weather improves in spring. If he returns alone she will recognise his sincerity and somehow they will manage to communicate. Being so new to France, and to travel in general, he has a naive belief that no one can be completely ignorant of English. And Mademoiselle Elise, daughter of a successful rose-grower, undoubtedly received an education. So gradually he grows less ashamed of his lapse. You can plod along just so long, head down like a shire nag, whereas exuberance – indeed foolishness – is a human trait, a Lambert trait.

  four

  Mrs Ruby McWhirter,

  Frog’s Hollow,

  Ouyen, Victoria,

  August 2, 1968

  Dear Julie,

  I must apologise for the confusion on the telephone. I do not hear well. I’m afraid ‘Elizabeth Lambert’s daughter’ did not ring any bells. You must have thought me terribly rude. Nevertheless, I read your subsequent letter with interest and curiosity. It doesn’t surprise me that there are, as you say, Lamberts in every state and several more in New Zealand, not to mention those back in Britain. The old people were good breeders. I imagine it takes a particular vigilance to keep track of the various branches. I wish you luck. But as much as I welcome your letter you’ve probably written to the wrong person. I’m hardly the one to help you gather up a family history. I fancy I was an ignorant girl, not very observant and not a good listener. What’s more, after marrying Wattie and coming up here in 1925 I naturally lost touch with the Lambert side. I say naturally because in those days we didn’t travel much. His people were delightful, very welcoming and kind to a girl a long way from her parents. After Mum died in ’32 I didn’t have any great hankering to go back and see my sister and cousins, and I must say I was never close to Dad. If you leave out funerals and a few trips to Melbourne twenty years ago I’ve hardly been away. My sister Sylvia used to visit occasionally after the last war. She still writes once or twice a year, which is how I know anything at all of recent family matters.