The Dust That Falls From Dreams Page 22

  ‘Was it the same Hun?’ asked Christabel.

  ‘No, no. It wasn’t the same one. And then another time a courteous Hun waited for me to clear my guns and then he renewed the attack, so we had a good scrap, and I shot him down over Arras. I took him a bottle of cognac and some cigarettes in hospital, and we shook hands, but he got peritonitis, rather like poor Ashbridge, and died a few days later. I was very sorry about that. I always felt less awful when I could force someone down intact.

  ‘And once I lost my flight, somehow, and then I saw them not far away, slipping into some light cloud, so I caught up and came out the other side, and lo and behold, I was flying in formation right next to a little posse of Pfalz. The Hun beside me caught my eye at exactly the second that I caught his, and after a moment of complete mutual amazement, he laughed and signalled to me to fall back and creep away, and that’s exactly what I did. Mind you, even a whole posse of Pfalz would have had a struggle against a Camel. Much faster, but too slow on the turn.

  ‘So there was a little bit of chivalry from time to time, yes, there was; but what I remember the most is mowing down those columns of men and horses, seeing them topple, and fall, and being thankful that I couldn’t hear them because of the engine. Once there was a platoon up to its neck in water, but keeping going. You could use water to test the accuracy of your guns, because of the splashes. I strafed them and then came back for another go, and the brown water had turned red.’

  There followed a long silence as they reflected on the horror of this, and then Daniel said, ‘Lots of strange and inexplicable things happened. Once, when I was shot down between the lines and managed to get to our trenches after dark, I discovered that the PBI believed that there was a magnificently wild and fearless scout pilot who did the most amazing feats of acrobatics and daredevilry right over the lines, almost every day. The troops used to look out for him and watch him, and he never got shot down. They were full of wonder and admiration. They called him “the Mad Major”. He really bucked up the troops an awful lot, and they used to cheer him on. Lots of the boys used to go and stunt for the infantry, just to keep their peckers up. There was a Naval Air Service fellow called Christopher Draper, used to fly under bridges and so on, and so did Gwilym Lewis. I did it too, particularly after I found out where Ash and Albert and Sidney were, but I happen to know, and so does everyone else who has checked up on these sightings, that a great deal of the time there wasn’t, technically speaking, anyone there at all. In other words, according to all the logs there was sometimes nobody there when the Mad Major was stunting above the lines. I have often wondered…well…do you suppose there can be ghosts who appear in the daytime? Was it…something like the Angels of Mons? Or can one be in two places at once, but unaware of it?

  ‘Shall we talk about something else?’

  51

  My Heart Is Sick with Memories

  The Reverend Captain Fairhead arrived at exactly the appointed hour, having previously left his card in the old-fashioned, orthodox way. He was a small man, very neatly turned out, with a precise moustache. His hair was sparse and gingery, his lips were thin and straight, and his face had been aged before its time by the sights that he had witnessed.

  He was wearing gloves, and an officer’s warm over his uniform, which Millicent took from him after she had let him in. She greatly admired its fur collar and double-breasted front, thinking that Hutch would have looked grand in such a garment.

  Rosie would have preferred to have met him at the door herself, but somehow it had seemed more correct to sit in the drawing room on tenterhooks, pretending to be doing something. When Millicent ushered him in she rose from her chair to greet him, and he said, ‘Oh, please don’t get up.’ His voice was quiet. ‘You must be Miss McCosh.’ She nodded and smiled, and he said, ‘Reverend Captain Fairhead. I am very pleased to meet you.’

  ‘Please do sit down, Father,’ said Rosie, and to Millicent, ‘Would you bring in some tea and scones?’ To Fairhead she said, ‘It’s nice to have scones again. What a novelty it is to have enough sugar!’

  Captain Fairhead sat in an armchair but perched himself on the front of it, as if to show that she had all his attention. ‘I used to dream of scones. At the front. Jam and cream, scones still warm from the oven. That and a decent jug of beer.’

  ‘I hope you had a good journey here,’ said Rosie.

  ‘I did indeed. You should see all the women at the polling stations. Whoever would have thought it would happen at last? I dare say we’ll all get used to it.’

  ‘One has to be over thirty,’ Rosie reminded him. ‘So we sweet young things aren’t to be credited with wisdom yet.’

  ‘Bound to end up equal, though, isn’t it?’ said Fairhead. ‘I mean, what’s the point of a halfway house?’

  ‘My mother has just voted for Sir Kingsley Wood,’ said Rosie. ‘She is immensely pleased with herself. She was in the WSPU, but then she handed in her membership when it became violent. Now she feels almost insufferably vindicated.’

  ‘Quite rightly,’ said Fairhead. ‘I am very much looking forward to meeting her.’

  ‘She didn’t actually want other women to vote, though. She really only wanted it for herself. She took not being allowed to vote as a personal insult, and not as an affront to womankind in general. It’s good of you to come,’ said Rosie.

  ‘Felt I had to,’ replied Fairhead. ‘I am visiting a fair number of people, when I get the opportunity.’

  ‘But there must be so many!’

  ‘Thousands actually. Obviously I kept notes, but the rate of attrition was so high that one simply couldn’t keep track. It’s a blur of faces and wounds and short conversations and trying to listen to last words. I do remember Ashbridge very well, though. He was one of my first.’

  ‘I hope you’re not just visiting the relatives of officers.’

  ‘Good gracious, no. Why would you think that?’

  ‘It was only officers who got in the papers when they got killed. I always thought that was very shocking,’ said Rosie. ‘At Netley I got into masses of trouble for saying that officers and men shouldn’t be treated separately.’

  ‘I think I agree with you,’ said Fairhead, ‘but it’s never been done like that. Old habits die hard. And you’re forgetting that Ashbridge wasn’t an officer.’

  Rosie put her hand to her mouth. ‘Oh, I am sorry. Of course he wasn’t. But he was a gentleman, you know, officer class.’

  ‘There are man-made gentlemen and natural gentlemen,’ observed Fairhead, aware even as he said it that it was something of a cliché. ‘Ashbridge would have been the latter if he hadn’t already been the former.’

  ‘His friend Hutchinson was a natural gentleman,’ said Rosie. ‘He said he’d got to the front by coming out with a real one.’

  ‘Yes, I was very sorry to hear about what happened to him. Such bad luck after getting through the war, don’t you think? I hear you were most kind to him in his last days. Yes, er, he came out with a gentleman, and the gentleman concerned wouldn’t agree to go to war without him. I forget his name, one of those Frenchy names, de Soutoy or something. I remember him quite well, tall and confident, had hampers sent out, used to say “dash it” whenever his monocle fell out. He got a bullet through the face that took the back of his head off. That used to happen rather a lot.’

  ‘And Hutchinson stayed on?’

  ‘Too valuable to let go,’ replied Fairhead. ‘He was an excellent soldier, and he felt he owed it to the gentleman he’d lost. Nobody asked him to go back home, but he would have refused, and no one would have gainsaid him, so that was that, and he stayed on, out of loyalty.’

  ‘What was it about Ashbridge?’ asked Rosie. ‘Why did you write to me so many times? There must have been so many other bereaved to attend to.’

  ‘I wrote thousands of letters, all in pencil and all on pages torn from notebooks. I wrote them in dugouts and field hospitals and trains and carts. That was my war, comforting the dying and writing to t
heir relatives. All the same, Ashbridge was special.’

  ‘He was to me,’ said Rosie.

  ‘I think you want to know why he was special to me.’

  ‘I do, Captain. I would very much like to know.’

  ‘Because he was so beautiful.’

  Rosie looked at him, a dark suspicion arising in her imagination. ‘Beautiful?’ she echoed.

  Fairhead stood up and went to the window, as if looking out over the wintry garden might make it easier to muster his thoughts. He watched a magpie and a rook, engaged in a tug of war over a crust of bread.

  ‘War destroys everything,’ said Fairhead. ‘That’s obvious and well known to us all. But I have always felt that what is beautiful is especially sacred, that the loss of something beautiful is more tragic than the loss of something banal. As a Christian, I am quite sure that I shouldn’t feel this way, but I do. I was most affected by Ashbridge because he was the Greek ideal, if that makes sense to you.’

  ‘Of course it does.’

  ‘Athletic, bold, humorous, congenial, courageous, intelligent, honourable, stoical…one could go on and on. He was an Apollo.’

  ‘Have you ever seen a picture of Rupert Brooke?’ asked Rosie.

  ‘Yes!’ exclaimed Captain Fairhead. ‘The similarity struck me at once. The photograph of him with his left index finger up the side of his face, and that enormous tie, or is it some kind of cravat?’

  ‘I adore Rupert Brooke,’ said Rosie. ‘I read him every day, especially the love poetry.’

  ‘His poems are somewhat irreligious,’ said Fairhead. ‘They have a sort of pagan barbarousness about them.’

  ‘Do you mean the funny one about how fish think that God is a fish?’

  ‘No, no. I find that most witty, although I am sure I shouldn’t be amused. There is a sensuality I don’t feel comfortable with. How can I put it? It sometimes seems forced, or perhaps a little posed.’

  ‘Well, I know he was irreligious, and a socialist too, but actually I think there’s something quite religious about his irreligiousness. Does that make sense? Do you remember the one called “Failure”? The poet goes to Heaven to confront God “Because God put His adamantine fate/Between my sullen heart and its desire”? And it turns out that God’s throne is empty and everything is overgrown with moss. I think one would have to be very religious to have written that, to be so very disappointed with God. And there’s that one about angels carrying God’s dead body. Why would you write that if you weren’t terribly religious, deep down?’

  ‘I’ll have to think about that one. In fact, I have to confide in you, Miss McCosh, that I have come out of the war with the gravest doubts. You may recall the absolute faith and confidence of the first letters that I wrote to you. I’m afraid it fell off rather greatly as time went by. I would very much like to go to Heaven and question the Lord.’

  ‘Doubts, Father?’

  ‘Of course there were many times when I felt I was carried through on the shoulders of Our Lord, that it was the Lord who bore me up.’

  ‘I felt the same after Ash died, and then at Netley,’ said Rosie eagerly.

  ‘I am sure you did. You must have seen many of the same things as I did. One cannot manage such horrors unless one is carried by the Lord. All the same…’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I am sorry to say this, but I have been forced to question my vocation. I kneel to pray, and find myself accusing Him. I want to know why such things are tolerated; why they are tolerable to Him. I can’t help thinking of my sister, and of Ashbridge, of course, and then the many thousands of others.’

  ‘You receive no answer?’

  ‘Not as yet. I will wait.’

  ‘I do hope an answer comes,’ said Rosie.

  ‘Don’t you have doubts?’ asked the Captain.

  ‘Ottilie and Christabel do. My sisters. Sophie is either so silly or so bright that I never know what is really happening in her head. But I don’t have doubts. I don’t think about philosophical things. Not because I can’t; it’s because I don’t need to. I know that Jesus said, “I am with you always.” He is here, and I know that Ash is too. He promised, before he left. And I almost feel I know Our Lady personally.’

  ‘You’re lucky, Miss McCosh – luckier than I am. Do you know what helped me to soldier on?’

  ‘Do tell me,’ said Rosie.

  ‘It was the parable of the Good Samaritan. If I lose my faith entirely, if I decide that God is a delusion, I will always have that parable as the epitome of what is worth believing and what is worth acting upon.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I mean the idea that all men are our neighbours, and that one must love one’s neighbour as oneself. The rest of Christianity can go to hell, if push comes to shove. I hope I don’t offend you. Everything I did in the war came out of that belief. I learned it whilst tending to the enemy wounded.’

  But Rosie was following her own train of thought. ‘One of the nurses at Netley could see the souls of the dying leaving their bodies.’

  ‘You believed her?’

  Rosie was already thinking of something else, and did not answer. ‘I want to confess something to you.’

  ‘What? As in a confessional?’

  ‘No, no. I mean I have a burden and it troubles me very greatly, and I’d like to tell you.’

  ‘Please do,’ he said. ‘A trouble shared is a trouble halved, as they say.’

  ‘Captain Fairhead, I promised Ash I would pray for him every night, and I always did. Except the night before he was wounded.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Fairhead glumly, understanding at once, ‘that’s awful for you.’

  ‘I can’t help it, I know it’s silly. I can’t help feeling that if I had remembered to pray, Ash wouldn’t have been killed.’

  Fairhead reacted almost angrily. ‘My dear Miss McCosh, you completely misunderstand the nature of God. I am the last person to say that he understands what God is up to, but I do know that prayer is not the same as casting a spell.’

  Rosie felt unable to explain to him that she had a special relationship with the Mother of God. For her the Virgin was like a human being, who could be forgetful if not frequently reminded. It was the Virgin’s intervention that she’d sought every night.

  ‘Do you think there’s any point in praying to saints?’ she asked.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Fairhead. ‘I don’t know if saints have the power to intervene. Roman Catholics think they do. But we’re Anglicans, Miss McCosh. It seems to me that we’re a kind of halfway house between Luther and the Pope. We do assume that we have a direct line to God, though, so there really isn’t any point in praying to saints, even if it does no harm. Why talk to a minister when you can go straight to the King?’

  ‘I suppose you’re right,’ said Rosie. ‘Do you know “The Wayfarers”? By Brooke?’

  ‘No, I can’t say I remember it.’

  Rosie went over to the sideboard and came back with a slim book. She leafed through it, and presented it to Captain Fairhead at an open page. He took it to the window and read aloud:

  ‘Is it the hour? We leave this resting-place

  Made fair by one another for a while.

  Now, for a god-speed, one last mad embrace;

  The long road then, unlit by your faint smile.

  Ah! the long road! And you so far away!

  Oh, I’ll remember! But…each crawling day

  Will pale a little your scarlet lips, each mile

  Dull the dear pain of your remembered face.

  …Do you think there’s a far border town, somewhere,

  The desert’s edge, last of the lands we know,

  Some gaunt eventual limit of our light,

  In which I’ll find you waiting; and we’ll go

  Together, hand in hand again, out there,

  Into the waste we know not, into the night?’

  ‘How beautifully you read that!’ said a playful voice from the doorway. It was Sophie, returned from the Tarn, where s
he had been throwing stale bread for the ducks. The chaplain strode towards her, extending his hand, feeling unaccountably delighted. ‘Sorry about my cold hands,’ said Sophie. ‘I got quite perished at the Tarn and am probably going to die of ammonia. How fortunate to have a priest in the house!’

  After he had left, with a light step and an invitation to return for tea the following Tuesday, Sophie said, ‘Did you notice that he has the ribbon of the Military Cross on his tunic? I do so wonder what he did.’

  ‘He had an oak leaf as well,’ said Rosie.

  ‘An heroic clergyman!’ exclaimed Sophie. ‘How marvellously anonymous!’

  ‘Anonymous?’

  ‘Oh, is that wrong? I mean that word which means that something doesn’t quite fit. I’m always getting them muddled up.’

  ‘Anomalous?’

  ‘Well, it’s almost the same.’

  ‘Think of all the martyrs. Hooper, Ridley and Latimer. People like that,’ said Rosie. ‘It’s not unusual at all.’

  ‘But that was such a long time ago,’ said Sophie. ‘The Church of England simply doesn’t do saints and martyrs any more. Not since we were in the caves.’

  ‘Mary Tudor lived in a cave?’

  ‘Surely not,’ said Sophie, ‘I am quite certain we must have been in grass huts by then. Probably with wattle and daub and a hole to let the smoke out.’ She reflected a moment, and asked, ‘How did we burn people at the stake before the invention of matches?’

  ‘Tinder and flint,’ said Rosie. ‘I hear that birch bark catches very easily. I suppose that if you wanted fire you knocked on people’s doors until you found someone with something in the brazier or on the stove, and you lit your spill and rushed home with it. Or to the pyre. I did hear of a case where all the local people put out their cooking fires so that some martyrs couldn’t be burned. I wish I could remember where it was. It might have been Spain.’