The Accidental Soldier Read online

  six

  PROJECT NOTES, August 17, 1968

  Day trip to Rushburn to poke about and photograph Anglican church window. Bad road after Bendigo. Three hours up, three hours back. Exhausted. But what a revelation! What a precious little scandal, even if it’s rubbish! Thank you, Mrs Straughan.

  I’m glad I didn’t invite Mum. She would have talked herself hoarse about the worthy Lamberts. We would have got bogged down in genealogy. No one would have got a word in. Mrs Straughan certainly wouldn’t have said what she said.

  The woman who I’d arranged to meet, Anglican stalwart with keys to the church, was unexpectedly absent. Instead I ended up with Mrs Straughan. Nasty little person with a monkey face. She didn’t have time to walk up to the church. And no, she couldn’t give out the keys to a stranger. I explained that I’d made arrangements with Mrs So-and-so. I was expected. I’d driven three hours from Melbourne, for goodness’ sake. All very well, but she had a sick dog to look after. I said I’d drive her up and back. It was only 200 yards. Finally convinced her, but she remained crabby. What did I want to look at the window for anyway? General interest, I said. She had no idea who I was and I didn’t let on.

  The church sits at the top of a hill. Granite blocks, slate roof, not particularly pretty or impressive. But from the inside the windows sparkle – four intricate stained-glass pictures. I had no trouble picking out Uncle Harry’s. There’s a brass plate underneath: In memory of Private Harold Lambert who answered the call of duty. Date: 1930. Sponsors: Mr Lewis Broughton and ‘grateful parishioners’. The scene itself is beautiful in a morbid way, very sombre tones. A pale and English-looking Jesus carries a lantern through a garden of transparent blues and greens. Lilies spring up at his feet. A pomegranate bush droops with ripe fruit. Jesus knocks at the door of a little barrel-vaulted temple: the House of God.

  I took several photos. Mrs Straughan had been standing impatiently at the door, but now she came up beside me. ‘That dirty bugger!’ she said.

  I nearly dropped. What dirty bugger? Who did she mean?

  ‘That Lambert fellow. He ran for his life.’

  I stared at her. ‘Harold Lambert?’

  ‘Everyone knows he ran from the enemy. He was a dirty bugger.’

  When she saw my unusual interest she clammed shut. She had imagined I was interested in windows, not the man. I couldn’t get her to repeat herself. What did she mean he was a dirty bugger? No explanation.

  I wanted to talk to other people, but who? It’s not something you repeat to just anyone. ‘Mrs Straughan says Harold Lambert was a deserter and a dirty bugger. Please comment.’

  I rang cousin Terry when I got home, just for someone to tell. ‘Oh, yeah,’ he said. ‘That’s been around for years.’ Is it true? He doesn’t know. It’s just something he was told. Why hadn’t Mum heard it? Why hadn’t I heard it? Boys’ gossip, not for female ears. ‘You know what the old blokes are like!’

  ‘You mean Uncle Dick?’

  ‘Don’t know. Can’t remember. Might have been old Dickie.’

  seven

  Harry is conscious of little birds squabbling in the branches well before the day plays on his eyelids. Though curious to see the cause of the commotion, he can’t bring himself to move a muscle. His knees are locked against his chest and it seems his spine has fused into a contorted bow. He has a ricked neck and a throbbing head, yet to adjust his body even a little exacerbates the pain. His only comfort is the warmth of his breath on his scarred knuckles. At last he opens his eyes and sees the pale thatch of the house and light splintering on the greenhouses. In the yard someone is busy. He strains for a better view, suffering a fierce pulse at the back of his skull, and catches only an inconclusive glimpse. But he supposes it’s her. The same squarish build. Who else can it be?

  She opens the barn, and once inside, chatters unintelligibly as if to a child. As far as he can gather she’s feeding livestock. Probably pigs, though in this climate they lock up everything at night. Uncle George talked to his pigs. Good listeners.

  He detects the first sounds of a train. Reinforcements coming up from Le Havre. Very faint at this stage, the chuff-chuff-chuff has a peculiar solidity, as if the steam is turning to hard matter on contact with the cold air. He’s becoming practised at identifying trains. In the night he got to six before he stopped counting. He makes the effort to refer to his watch, a difficult manoeuvre, considering his numbed hands. He hasn’t the steadiness to insert his fingernail beneath the cover, but eventually it pops open. Two minutes after six. At the bakery the world begins at five. He’s sure he’s behaved foolishly. He aches for the security of his bakehouse, and even for the men of his unit. By now Bunter will have arrived in the back areas. They may be doing nothing more dangerous than nursing a mobile cooker.

  Between the railway and the house a thin fog lies in the depressions. Smooth humps of pasture rise up like islands. Eventually the locomotive reveals itself as a smudge against the developing green of the hills. He can’t judge the distance. Anything from half a mile to several. Preoccupied with the train, he fails to notice that the woman has come from the front gate. All at once she’s just thirty yards away and heading directly towards him. Mademoiselle Elise Cordier. No mistaking her slightly pugged features. He stays put among the poplars, hoping she won’t look up. She is grimmer, even more worn than last time. A strand of iron-coloured hair hangs loose from her kerchief. She treads mechanically, passing within feet of him. He recognises the brown uniform. They all wear it, all the factory workers, a sort of limp fustian that looks permanently soiled. He doesn’t know why he should be so dismayed. He has grown accustomed to the idea of her being old, and even to the possibility she was no great beauty to begin with. But those big agricultural boots! Old Cordier must have been a fond father, a man with a generous imagination.

  As the woman shrinks into the brightening fields, dipping in and out of the fog, he discovers a fresh discomfort. Hunger. His stomach has been counting the hours. The thought of scrambling day after day for food horrifies him. Worse, a song has stolen into his head, a song from the last months of his mother’s illness – sweet and debilitating. He shuffles out onto the gravel road, standing openly, almost hoping he’ll be seen so he can surrender without a fuss. In both directions there is no one.

  He knows that he should conceal himself but, bereft of both energy and will, he can’t muster the conviction. Even as he pulls open the gate he experiences a sense of distance from his actions. He takes the left-hand path and raps at the door – just in case. No response. Moving along the side of the building, he finds a window that isn’t wholly papered over. The interior is gloomy and cluttered with closely packed furniture. He tries the sash and discovers it’s locked from the inside. A brief search of the garden turns up a smooth stone, but when he arrives back at the window he freezes, unable to bring himself to break the glass. He doesn’t know what restrains him. A dread of sudden noise? Of criminality? Ridiculous inhibitions in a deserter, but for several minutes he stands in a daze, until he feels the stone slip from his fingers.

  Roused, he pushes along the fence beside the rose-fields. Small flames of green have ignited along the otherwise naked canes. At the end of the yard he steps over the collapsed fence and follows a furrow. Fifty or sixty yards on he arrives at an embankment, a dam wall, wet and bristling with sedge. Up top he’s confronted by an expanse of black water. The first rays of morning sun penetrate the fog obliquely, and he slumps down, hoping to thaw a little in the promise of warmth. He wishes he could return to the resolve and certainty of the previous night. But the only urgency left in his belly is hunger. He is without wisdom or discipline and his head is full of his mother’s sickness and a lilting female voice, a pure and sisterly soprano. He remembers the sheet music passing from family to family, copied by hand. They sung it around the piano at Albion, Maggie and old Mary and the cousins warbling like birds. They sung it at the Burrakee Sports, a c
horus of pretty girls done up in the colours of the Allies. ‘We don’t want to lose you but we think you ought to go . . . ’

  It’s beyond him how he became useless. Until the war he was well thought-of. He thought well of himself. But when he examines this quick appraisal of his past he begins to doubt. The best he can say is he existed in comfort. He had a defined place, a hidey-hole, the nest of a solitary animal. A part of him longed to emerge from the unwholesome air as a man. But for several years now there has been only one sort of man. It occurs to him that if he’d valued himself more highly, that if he’d been able to hold to a gem of personal conviction, he would have avoided France like death.

  His mother got sick in the third year, in the middle of the conscription row, just after his last apprentice enlisted and when his mother’s beloved Anglican choir was noticeably lacking in virile male voices. She had stomach pains; complained of terrible wind. From the beginning he spoke of her ‘nerves’.

  The song ebbs and flows, soaring away behind his resurgent thoughts. He is susceptible to the sadness, to the longing and despair, and despises it at the same time. He remembers young Ruby humming it in the shop. Not once has he heard it in France. The men have less sentimental songs.

  His mother claimed to be too ill for songs, too ill for after-dark visitors, too ill even for family. Too ill for pleasure. And yet she continued to read. She sat upright with the rigour of an Egyptian statue, her nose in the pages of Agnes Giberne. She wore her woollen nightgown and an old cardigan. Her long carbuncled feet were bare on the rug. Undeniably she missed the music and gossip and card-play but she had made her bed.

  If the children came in the afternoons she would have him believe they were a great bother. She fooled no one. She never reproached him for not providing her with grandchildren of her own, perhaps because she had been instrumental in freezing out Susan Minton after his father’s death. Losing Sammy was her first great catastrophe. She wasn’t about to lose her son as well. And Susan was an opinionated woman, a schoolmistress, to Ma’s mind an arch interloper. He didn’t fight hard. He was too baffled by his father’s death. But also he recognised that his feelings for Susan Minton didn’t run deep. They played tennis. They collected wildflowers from the scrub. They were the leads in several skits and an Easter pageant. It was a public friendship, a pleasant convenience, interspersed with as much secret touching as Susan judged necessary. She telegraphed her intentions by sucking breath-sweetening lozenges. He found her orchestrated kisses overly wet. The couple of times he pushed his trousered dick against her middle she broke into a teacherly smile as if congratulating him on his equipment.

  His cousin Maggie, from whom he’d been inseparable as a child, took a nosy interest in his attachments. By this time she was Mrs Andrew McArdle, mother of three, but she continued to speak of ‘my big Harry’.

  ‘We’re friends,’ he said.

  ‘But it’s on the wane,’ Maggie observed. She meant ‘doomed’.

  He didn’t confirm this, but it was patently true.

  ‘I always thought she had a fat behind,’ said Maggie. She too had a fat behind, especially now, but hers was confidently fat.

  Susan Minton sensed a dead end. She took the expedient of offering greater sexual licence, allowing him to grope about under her skirt, but it wasn’t particularly exciting for either. Although their friendship continued to limp along, she understood not to expect ‘developments’. Eventually she became Mrs William Tanner, a policeman’s wife, and moved away.

  ‘She weren’t the right one,’ Ma consoled him. ‘No hurry. You’re still young. Weddings and littlies are best left to when you’re settled in the mind.’

  Settled in the mind. When had he ever been that? Yet he slipped easily enough into a reverential mourning for Sammy, and his mother didn’t complain that in the face of George and Mary’s tally of thirty-seven descendants, she could boast just one. Not that she was openly envious. Glad as she was to see ‘all the little Lamberts’, she was equally glad to see them go. It’s Harry’s belief she came to prefer the simplicity of their immediate family of two (with its echo of three).

  Light glimmers across the black water of the dam. A frog croaks sluggishly within a few yards of his feet. His head aches with singing, the single voice swelling momentarily into a choir and demanding first attention: ‘We don’t want to lose you but we think you ought to go . . . ’

  He knows it can’t be killed or shut out, that it must be allowed to die naturally. It distresses him to remember his mother as she was during those last months – the sagging around the eyes, that familiar frown of absorption. She was a woman subjecting herself to austerities, literally making herself sick on his behalf.

  He made efforts to shake free of her, feeble efforts. ‘Did you hear Eddie Holt’s gone off?’ he asked.

  She acknowledged him with a minimal nod. She knew what was coming, needed all her will not to flinch.

  ‘My turn next,’ he said with a tilt at flippancy.

  He can map out her deterioration. He understands it on one level, not on others. There are precipitating events, the most memorable being Mrs Hanna’s son Albert winning the Victoria Cross. The premier of Victoria came to Rushburn, and other important people too. There were ceremonies and speeches and the mother of the hero, a bristle-chinned Baptist in a bell dress, stood on the podium to exhort every mother who called herself British to relinquish her son. Lew Broughton expanded the Express to six pages, four devoted to Albert Hanna – reminiscences of family, teachers, church elders and friends, excerpts of letters from Cairo, and then from Gallipoli, eulogies from officers and soldiers, and authentic-looking diagrams of the terrain in which Albert achieved his apotheosis. The turmoil and hoopla lasted a month, and afterwards even Harry could perceive the shift in who was who among the town’s women. In with the new, out with the old.

  ‘My turn next,’ he repeated.

  ‘What, at your age?’ she snarled.

  ‘I can name others older.’

  She slapped her book shut with some of her old contempt. ‘We’d be in a sorry state if it came down to you, Harold Lambert!’

  In the night, to emphasise her feelings, she awoke and vomited.

  eight

  By late afternoon he’s famished. But on the positive side he’s less cold, his inner clothes now moist rather than wet, and his headache has faded. He’s aware of the connection between his mental and physical tides; feels the rising swell of hope. His desires begin to seem sacred again. He fixes the previous night’s faith in his mind, the child-belief that strangers and circumstances and even inanimate objects might bend to his needs. Yet the feeling is precarious. He doubts it could survive another night in the open. Lying low in the grass, he keeps watch on the road, and on the path from the poplars. What strikes him is the isolation of the Cordier property. It’s all of four miles to the outskirts of the city. To the north-west, in the direction the trains come from, is a biggish settlement, most probably Maromme. Montigny is just as distant, hidden in the southern forest. Along the raised road that presumably goes back to Rouen there are two equally isolated farmhouses, both tucked away among low-lying woods. He suspects they are deserted, as he doesn’t see any smoke. All day hardly anyone has happened by. A woman driving a cow. A little troop of old buffers going shopping. A pensioned-off soldier still wearing the gaudy red pants of 1914. He speculates that old Cordier had premises in Rouen, or in Montigny proper. Even the fame of Mademoiselle Elise, the rose, can’t have lured many people out here.

  When she reappears, plodding resolutely from the trees, he thinks better of showing himself. He can see her panicking: a big unshaven man jumping up out of nowhere!

  She passes through the gate and vanishes around the side of the house. He resolves that after a proper interval, giving her time to settle, he will knock politely at the front door. He doesn’t know what he will say.

  Five minutes later, whi
le he’s still procrastinating, she comes out again. He hears rather than sees her. He hears the swish of an implement. He crawls along the furrow for a better view. On the embankment, silhouetted against the glare, she shifts her weight rhythmically. It’s some time before he understands that she is cutting grass. Every so often she bends down, gathers up an armful and drops it onto what must be a spread cloth (he can see a fragment of printed blue). Periodically she stands and arches her back, the hooked blade raised overhead. Then she resumes her routine, hips swinging, kerchief bobbing in the sunset. Finally she ties up her bundle into a blue bale and heaves it up onto her shoulder. Stooping under the load, she finds a way down and through the roses and disappears behind the building. Soon there’s a knock and a clang, which he interprets as her unbolting the barn. He hears geese, a fractious welcome, and then her voice, brusque yet somehow indulgent. When she eventually returns to the house the first bright star has risen, though the sky is still a metallic grey. The grass is wetter and his chest feels sodden. Unwilling to delay any longer, he moves back along the row and emerges to straddle the side fence. He walks through her garden, scales two worn steps and taps timidly at the door. So as not to crowd her he steps down again and waits below. She comes noisily, opening up without caution. He’s prepared for her puzzled look and composes what he hopes is an innocent face. She says something he doesn’t understand. Her expression hardens as she recognises him: one of those Australians who came about roses. Doubtless she’s telling him again that the nursery is closed and has been since the men left; that he should go away. At last he finds a word, just one, dredged up from God knows where. ‘Effrayé.’ This isn’t what he intended. I’m afraid. Again there’s her searching look, partly curious, partly hostile. In his frustration he resorts to Charlie Chaplin gestures. First he’s running on the spot: exaggerated under-water movements, knees pounding his chest, repeated glances back over his shoulder at unknown assailants. All at once they have him! Captured! With the flat of his hand across his eyes to signify a blindfold he stands at attention. Next comes the firing squad. bang! He falls back dead.