The Accidental Soldier Read online

  Even in the exertion of his performance he doesn’t miss her fleeting concern. She observes the scarred backs of his hands. He turns his bad ear to her, hoping that this mild childhood disfigurement – a ruddiness of the skin, barely visible in the failing light – might persuade her he’s suffered a soldier’s horrors. Since she stands on the upper step their faces are on a level, and she examines him earnestly. There are questions in her gaze, and a plea for straight dealing, and a threat. She glances furtively at the road. East and west. Not a soul. Indecisively, nervously, she jiggles her dirt-etched hands. His heart whops and bumps. He’s cold with sweaty apprehension, yet dares to believe that this might be one of those rare coincidental moments when the world agrees with his needs. She jigs her hands. He doesn’t know whether she means ‘Come in’ or ‘Get lost’ – but he follows as she retreats inside. He pulls the door shut behind him and listens in the darkness for her breath, for the brush of her clothing, for the squeak of loose boards. The palms of his hands encounter architraves and sudden recesses, rooms leading off the hall. He trails her through an open space without furniture, and on into a salon with a west-facing window that lets in a pinkish glow. The ceiling feels very close, as if the upper storey is weighing on his head, and the air has a damp locked-up smell. There is a sofa and matching chairs, dirty and threadbare with shabby gold braiding and carved griffin feet, and a set of three-legged tables tucked one under the other, smallest to largest. His eye is caught by twinkling decanters on the sideboard, all empty, and by framed certificates on the wall. Water stains run in brownish strips down the floral wallpaper. He can’t imagine sparkling family gatherings taking place between these walls. This is a room that has been in decline for years, since well before the war. And yet, apparently, it is the place to bring a visitor.

  She has him sit, and dispensing with speech altogether, ladles imaginary food into her mouth. Her thick eyebrows, still youthfully black in contrast to her grey-streaked hair, rise up in inquiry. He mimes his eagerness and she slips away, presumably to cook, leaving him to wait as the sun sets and his hands grow indistinct in his lap. In a far-away room she bangs and scrapes, and he’s struck by the enormity of the house, a great empty beehive in which the last worker labours alone. And doubtless there is as much space again upstairs. He has a mental picture of all the family together, old Cordier presiding over a laden table. Of course there must have been a swarm of servants, too, in the prosperous days. And all on the strength of one rose. He knows of no other Cordier success, or not one that raised the family to prominence beyond France.

  As for the actual Mademoiselle Elise, he knows he’s on shaky ground. Relieved as he is to have been permitted into her house, he wonders on what basis. He doesn’t believe in her spontaneous generosity. From the little he’s seen, and the good deal he’s heard, they are a shrewd lot, these French women. And this one, being older, has his measure at once. She finds a big strapping man on her doorstep, a foreigner, maybe a lunatic, and he spins her a tale about firing squads. What is it to her whether they blow him full of holes? No, she simply sees a dangerous customer and rather than risk violence, she plays along.

  The darkness is distressing, more complete than outdoors, and heavy with atmospheric moisture. The first of the nightly trains pushes across the plain. At its closest point it makes the house shake ever so gently. Windows tremble in their sills. On the sideboard the decanters tinkle. On impulse he rises to go looking for her. But she’s silent now, and when he gropes into the passage down which she’s vanished there’s no light to guide him. ‘Mademoiselle Elise!’ he sings out. She doesn’t respond, yet he hears a shuffle, and several steps further on has the aroma of food to steer by. Eventually he sees a gentle light wavering on a wall. ‘Mademoiselle Elise,’ he tries again, wary of bursting in on her. She looks up as he stands in the doorway. A big room, a kitchen. In English he tells her he’s come to help – not that in the dark salon he had been lonely and vaguely afraid. It’s his form of address, as far as he can make out, that annoys her. ‘Mademoiselle Elise . . . ’ He has no grasp of French manners, but it seems that this is too intimate. A presumption. She rises from the niggardly fire and chastises him. Her mouth is tight with impatience, as if he’s not only rude but stupid. Then she pats her sternum and gives herself a title he can’t correctly pronounce. Holum or Colom or something. He must call her this. What it means, who can say? Host? Good Samaritan? Yet it smacks of formality, somehow stressing her superior position. He’s not arguing. When she sees him standing there in abject submission she extends her open hand like a dinner plate. She expects something, a reciprocal act. He takes a punt and tells her his name. She takes it up at once, pronouncing it ‘Erri’. Then she insists he return to the salon. He might refuse to go. The smell of bubbling food, the dancing light, her presence, are all comforts he doesn’t want to give up. But he’s aware, too, of her tension. He has invaded her privacy. There is a low bed with untidy rucked blankets beside the hearth, and a clothes chest. Long socks, a blouse, and a pair of grey drawers drape over the iron fender. The daughter of Monsieur Cordier reduced to camping in the servants’ kitchen! Offering apologies, he wades back into the darkness.

  He proves an appalling night navigator. Remembering that contemptuously pursed mouth, he hasn’t the courage to call for help. For a while he blunders along passages and from room to room, one of which, quite by chance, turns out to be the salon. He sits obediently, listening to his stomach gurgle, until she arrives with a lit candle and a bowl of stew. She situates the biggest of the three-legged tables in front of him, drips hot wax onto the polished walnut surface and fixes the base of the candle there so he can see what he’s eating. He’s mildly shocked by this disrespect for the family assets, but not so shocked that it spoils his appetite. He sucks appreciatively from the spoon. Potatoes and onions, and not much else. Certainly no meat. But good and hot. When he looks up she’s gone. Disgusted perhaps. He scoops the last skerricks from his bowl, but his stomach is still biting.

  A full hour he sits with nothing to do, no company, and increasingly cold. He refers regularly to his watch. A little after 8:00 p.m. she returns, detaches his candle, now a dribbling stub, and beckons. A certain amount of wandering, a sweep through a derelict dining room, and they have stairs to climb. Steep stairs. There’s a landing halfway up and he glances vertiginously down: a fine place to break his neck. Then up they go again, she leading the way. He keeps his eyes downcast to avoid looking at her behind, which at one point burbles and bugles with the exertion of successive steps. Neither of them say a word, but he thinks of the famous farters of his acquaintance, all men, and of his coy women relations who swear that women don’t do it. (‘May God strike me down if I did!’ Aunt Mary declares when George, her husband, makes insinuations.) Harry can’t see the mademoiselle’s expression to gauge whether she’s quite so mortified. And a moment later, when they stand at the head of the stairs, she’s wholly composed, and certainly not about to acknowledge anything so trivial.

  The upper storey seems less complex, less like a rabbit warren. It consists of a central hall and half a dozen rooms. The one she allocates him is large and dominated by a high double bed. He accepts the candle and explores, boots loud on the timber floor. When he turns to thank her he finds that she hasn’t come in. She bids him ‘Bonne nuit’ and closes the door. Almost simultaneously she clicks the key in the lock.

  Although he understands her distrust, he’s nonetheless indignant. He might protest; he might shout and bang the walls, but it would only confirm her fears. He stands in the middle of the room, undecided whether to undress. If she has gone for the gendarmes they might be here within the hour. Then there are the provos to look forward to, the questions, the abuse. He’s heard of terrible beatings, men left permanently damaged. But he’s sceptical; can’t see the Australian police laying into one of their own. And he’s very tired. Even an hour’s kip would be something.

  He peels off his damp coat, then
his even-damper tunic and shirt. The skin of his upper body is yellow in the candlelight. The muscles appear loose and wasted, and he’s convinced that after just twenty-four hours of privation his health is suffering. Unravelling his puttees, he shifts his weight on the bed and it groans and twangs like a primitive stringed instrument. He removes his trousers and pulls aside the sheets. They are clean, but with an odour, and icy cold. Once in, he curls up like a child. The pillow smells distinctly of poultry. He drifts off into sleep itching at notional lice.

  His father is there waiting, his face perpetually puckered and winking. All these years dead – fourteen this recent Christmas – yet here he is, popping up the instant Harry closes his eyes! These days his repertoire is very limited, just the one expression: a facetious grin. Appropriate enough to the circumstances he knew, but not in the least comforting. He would have Harry believe that everything is a laughing matter, even desertion.

  ‘Them Froggies could teach us a thing or two,’ he says.

  Then he’s gone and Harry’s awake, inhaling the damp. Outside the window lightning flickers. The thunder is distant but louder than the fizzling of rain on thatch. And in place of his grinning father there is a more rational construction, a good-natured and liberal man, but not one who would have smiled on cowardice. Harry has heard the stories, mostly from Uncle George. Poverty and blind patriotism. How in their one-roomed cottage in rural Suffolk the brothers had dreamt of bright red coats and marching into battle. How their heroes were Wellington, York and Sir John Moore, two generations gone but celebrated like living gods. How there had been uncles and cousins who had gone to India, mostly to die, and how even this didn’t stop half-starved village boys regarding the army as the royal road off the farms. Fortunately his father and George were apprenticed to a joiner in Ipswich instead. They took brides and crossed the world and by the time Harry came along, a late child ten years into the marriage, Sammy was devoted to the civil arts: bread, roses, painting, all the good things as they appeared to a labourer’s son.

  Harry doesn’t doubt that he has become a believer in turn – in liberality, in peace. But it amuses him, lying there in a Frenchwoman’s bed, to think of his father’s love for France. Never set foot in the place, couldn’t speak a word of the language (other than what he read in those hyperbolic rose catalogues), but no one could tell him it wasn’t the most civilised country on earth – a nation of democrats and creative geniuses, the engine-room of human progress. Witness the dining room walls at home: the monochromatic prints of scenes from Ovid, the captions all reading ‘after Monsieur So-and-so’.

  ‘Oh yes, them Froggies could teach us a thing or two.’

  His ignorance and his optimism went together, as ludicrous as his stumpy pint-sized figure (like all the old Suffolkers, he attributed his lack of inches to the starvation diet of his youth). People admired his energy and laughed at his good nature. He laughed with them. Harry credits his father with never having felt beleaguered or unappreciated or blocked in his endeavours. And what results! Of course George and Lew and certain others had a hand in it too, but without Sammy, Rushburn might have remained a rough gold town, and never have become a city in miniature with slate-roofed churches, a lending library and a shire building dignified by moulded Doric columns. Yet the Sammy Lambert Harry remembers is without airs or condescension. While his mother is an assertive force, Sammy is a quiet word in his ear, a consoling presence.

  ‘Poor things,’ Sammy remarked one afternoon as they stood watching George’s twin bull-calves. The animals had been removed from their mother too early, and took comfort in sucking one another’s pistil. ‘They don’t know no better,’ Sammy said. This was as near as he ever came to disapproving of Harry’s interest in a boy called Christopher Duncan.

  For cousin Maggie, who was thirteen, a year older than him, it was farcical. ‘They won’t get any milk doing that.’

  ‘No,’ said Sammy. He continued to lean against the rail. Harry doesn’t think he was embarrassed or disgusted by the ‘poor things’.

  Christopher was never a special friend. Harry did not have special friends. But nor was he unpopular. He drifted happily between groups and individuals, secure in the complacent self-absorption of an only child. In the weeks before what his mother euphemistically referred to as his ‘troubles’ he went several times to Christopher’s house, once with Maggie, to look at his Orpington chicks. These were noisy and dirty, forever shitting, but Christopher’s tenderness for them was infectious. They prepared a feed of mashed bran and milk sops and collected greens from the night-man’s lane behind the yard. Harry learnt to enjoy their insistent pecking at his hand. He enjoyed their trust.

  Lunchtimes at school, when he played British Bulldog in the shadows of the black cypresses, Christopher was among the boys who tried to storm past him. For his age Harry was a colossus, able to lift his peers effortlessly from the ground, so almost always he was ‘he’ – the ogre in the middle. He looked along the line to choose his adversary. He was not aware of choosing Christopher more often than anyone else, but it seems he did. Soon it was a teasing game. The boys said he wanted to give Christopher Duncan one up the ring-hole. He wanted nothing of the sort. The idea was incomprehensible. But he laughed along with them, following his father’s affable example. He didn’t see any harm. It was just childish talk, meaningless noise.

  Or was it? At some point he discovered that Christopher was quietly beautiful. Christopher was thin. His hair was black and lank. He had dark eyes, always with a quick bead of light. Harry liked to be near him, but his longing, despite what the boys said, was naive and undiscerning, innocent of conceptions of male and female, or sexual heat. Sometimes he looked at him in class. Naturally, he was observed. For a week or two he enjoyed the notoriety – until his teacher, Mr Saunders, pulled him aside one morning to tell him he must stop worrying poor Christopher. Worrying was his word. And Mr Saunders was one of the luminaries of Harry’s world, second only to his father. He had never before been the recipient of such sharp words.

  His instinctive remedy was anger – perhaps not his first uprush of cruel stupidity, but the one he remembers as a sort of Fall. Come lunchtime he was among the British territorials sent to put down the rebellious blacks. He chased Christopher through the African fastness and finally caught and pinned him against a tree. Panting for breath, Christopher regarded him without fear because despite the annoyances of recent days Harry was his friend – big Harry with the eternal fat-lipped smile – and this was a game, or so he thought. For a second or two Harry looked into his beaming child-eyes, furious because he was beautiful. Then he punched him. Christopher bled and bled.

  Christopher’s father had words with Sammy. It seemed Harry had broken Christopher’s nose. There was a bill from Dr Marchant. Sammy paid up, but with the disclaimer that what had happened was just an unfortunate accident, all part of the rough and tumble for which boys were known. For weeks Christopher’s nose was hidden behind a plaster cast. He was masked with racoon-like bruises and the whites of his eyes were stained with clotted veins. Harry did not know how to say sorry. He was afraid Christopher would think he was trying to worry him. He noticed that no one made jokes about him any more, or not to his face. It was very lonely.

  ‘No, they don’t know no better,’ said Sammy, and moved away at last.

  Harry didn’t want to be one of those ‘poor things’ his father pitied. He felt suddenly unwell, with headaches and hot joints that Dr Marchant attributed to a vague ‘fever’. Home from school for a fortnight, he kept to his upstairs room, read Sir Walter Scott and ate big consoling meals. He swallowed pills and slurped curative syrups from a tablespoon, but sensed that no medicine could dispel the effects of Mr Saunders’ abhorrence. Some mornings he woke up angry that he couldn’t be as he was. He had liked himself. He had imagined he was likeable no matter what he did or said. But they had got inside him. How did adults manage to stop other people getting inside them
? He sat at the window of his citadel above his father’s shop looking down at pedestrians and animals in the dusty street. He listened to how rough boys called to one another, learning the rhythms of their half-belligerent raillery. Gradually it occurred to him that he’d blundered into a big iron trap that most boys knew how to step around. And it wasn’t the only trap. If it hadn’t been Christopher Duncan, it would have been something else. How did adults live? How could his father go about with such a broad and sincere smile on his face? Harry welled with admiration for his father. Sammy loved him like his own fingers and toes, without question. So did Ma. He really didn’t need anyone else. Fortified by this idea, he began to improve. He sat out in the sunny backyard and read Robinson Crusoe, and was heartened by how well the hero managed without others. His island seemed less a prison than a paradise.

  After going three days without a headache Harry returned to school, but with a careful step, determined to fend off further assaults on his worth and equilibrium. No one’s opinion, favourable or unfavourable, would ever get inside him again. Mr Saunders could think what he liked, say what he liked; the boys could admire or despise him, and Harry would remain unmoved. The danger was letting the outside penetrate.