‘Ned, are you listening to me?’
‘Yes darling, of course I am.’
‘Then what was the last thing I said?’
‘You said that you’d agreed with the Committee Inspector and the estate trustees that fifteen acres of the old Rough should go down to ryegrass instead of barley.’
‘That’s right, and what I was about to say… oh Noggin, for pity’s sake stop pawing me about and pay attention! What I was about to say was that with three half-reasonable Land Girls in the sheds and Irish cows at only twelve pounds a head, we’d be mad not to double-up the herd right away. Fifteen shillings a week, that’s all we’d have to pay the girls, and they could billet in the village. Frank Longhurst’s using them over at Great Dean. There’s even talk of him putting in a steam-milker; although I personally doubt that he’d go that far, knowing what a miserable old skinflint that man is. But he is expanding his dairy enterprise to meet the demand. That’s the point – and so should we, Ned. Everyone says the bottom’s going to drop out of the cereal market as soon as the war’s over, and we’ve just got to be ready for it when it does.
‘Well then, what do you think?’
‘I think Frank Longhurst would willingly give his six best cows for a head cowman like mine – who’d sit on his knee for him and let him do this to her… and this!’
‘Ye Gods, Ned! Someone might come in!’
He was sitting in his father’s swivel desk chair, and the force with which Meriel wrenched herself free, revolved her tumescent husband through a full three hundred and sixty degree spin – to leave him facing out into the library again as she reached for the door handle.
‘Anyone would think you’d had enough of that kind of thing in the past few days to last a lifetime,’ she said severely. ‘But I can see you’re still unfit for any kind of serious discussion. So I’ll just have to hope that this little lot will bring you down to earth.’ She indicated the ledger and cash book, and the paper tower of spiked invoices which littered his father’s desk. ‘You’re home for good now, Ned, and it’s high time you stopped behaving like an over-sexed Jack donkey and woke up to your real responsibilities. The farm isn’t going to run itself, and I have more to do than waste my time acting the trollop for you, when there are hungry mouths to feed and a brainless Agricultural Committee to keep at bay.’
She was right of course, he thought, as she closed the door behind her. But he couldn’t help it. The war had made a sensualist of him, if nothing else. After the deprivations of the trenches, he found it quite impossible to look at Meriel without desiring her. When she spoke to him – when she looked into his eyes and her mouth opened to speak, he wanted to kiss her; to cover her parted lips with his, parted wider. And when she moved, her clothing was no barrier to his imagination. He knew her, every part of her. He wanted to caress her where the fabric caressed her, to feel her warmth. Then when she yielded to him at last in the darkness of their bedroom in the Flat, the intensity of the pleasure he took in her and the shuddering violence of his climaxes had come as a revelation to them both.
Simmie was right. The war and France had changed him. In six months of almost continuous action in the battle of Arras and the defence of Monchy le Preux, he’d come to realise that as far as Nature was concerned, their lives had already run their useful courses, his and Meri’s. They’d paired and reproduced, so were now dispensable, as all the thousands who were dying across the Channel were despensable it seemed; for them each day of life a bonus.
In France Ned had learned to live entirely for the present, day by day and hour by hour – to expect no more from life than the momentary pleasures of a dandelion flower on the parados, or a rat that subsisted on human flesh threading its way between the shell holes with the daintiness of a ballerina. And paradoxically, the war had opened his eyes to a new kind of love; to a sense of male fraternity that he’d never really found at school or university – a fellowship with fighting men who lived like him, one day at a time. They were such a splendid crew, those gallant little Tommies of Arras and Monchy le Preux – men elevated in some inexplicable way by the degradation that was forced on them; men who could think of the enemy as ‘good old Jerry’ even as he strafed them; and who found cheery nicknames for every weapon and missile that he sent to kill them: ‘Flying Pigs’ and ‘Plum Puddings’ for trench mortars, ‘Coal Boxes’ for 5.9 shells and ‘Whizz-Bangs’ for 77s.
There was no substitute in Sellington for that kind of desperate levity, or for the stimulant of fear that bound him to those fellows in the trenches – nothing in Sellington for Ned but Meriel, and what she brought him when they made love in the lotus bed. For it was stimulation and immediacy that he needed now, not peace and permanence; and that was something that no one here could understand, his wife least of all.
Ned thought of Meriel again – of how she had felt on his lap. Of how she would look now on her way down to the dairy, swinging that firm little rump of hers in the unconsciously erotic way she always did. And wanting her and needing her again – he’d drawn a crude graphito on the blotting pad of his own comically priapic state – before tearing off the top sheet and turning hastily to Father’s farm account books.
There were the figures for the year ending April 1917 to consider in the light of Meriel’s idea for expanding the milking herd, before his next meeting with the estate trustees – and after that, two months of payments and receipts to enter for the current year. The last entry for July was for a bill from Jack Henty, the Jevington blacksmith: To twelve tines, 17 in. To drawing and mending 58 ditto. To plating a scythe – all neatly recorded in his father’s best copperplate writing.
Father would have understood, Ned thought. He would have known what it was like to feel excluded while others faced what must be done. It was strange when there had seemed so little to Father when he was alive, how very much one missed him now he wasn’t. Ned realised that the moment he walked into the library, and smelt the old books and saw Father’s big oak desk exactly as he’d left it. Father, who’d given his life in effect to keep Ned out there in France.
Ned shut the ledger with a thud that brought old Puck on the hearthrug back to life, and got up to walk over to the window. None of it seemed to matter any more – the blacksmith’s bills and trading figures, the numbers in the milking herd or the projections for ’17/18. By April 1918, the war in France could be won or lost. That was what mattered.
‘Did you kill any Germans, Daddy? Did you see anyone get blown to bits? Were you scared of the emeny? Did you get any rides in tanks?’ His children, his little boys, were the only ones who really wanted to hear about the war. But how could he look into those tender faces and describe the horrors that still came so vividly to him still in his dreams? How could he tell them about rags of grey flesh rotting underneath the duckboards? Or the things that carrion birds, the crows and magpies, squabbled over in no-man’s-land? Or the lice that left a man’s body as soon as it was cold? Or the sheer, profound nobility of men who could take it all and still remember how to laugh?
‘Simmie, will you listen if I tell you what it’s like out there? Because I need someone to understand.’ He’d caught her by the gate of the stable yard on her way up to the village post office. And however she hated hearing it, Simmie had listened to him with such concern and sympathy in her face, that for the moment Ned lost all restraint.
‘Can you imagine how it feels to be trained behind the lines for a coming offensive, Simmie, to be shown what to do in canvas replicas of the trenches you’re to attack. But then to find yourself in a real system that’s nothing like them, because your own bombardment’s shelled and pulverised it out of recognition. And when you have to lead a group of frightened boys into the guns? How can I begin to tell you what that feels like – watching them rest their elbows on their knees to stop their hands from shaking while they drink their rum rations; rocking back and forth against the timbers, licking their lips and trying hard to swallow – and staring, staring at you with great dark eyes as if you are their only hope.’
He’d been speaking too fast, heard his own words running into one another – but couldn’t stop them coming. Couldn’t let her go.
‘And when you have to climb the ladder, call them up behind you: “Good luck, men!” – but boys; they’re mostly boys… And your mind has turned to ice, and your heart’s beating so violently you think it’s going to jump right out of you… and you’re running, running with your head down as if that could make a difference – and you’re sweating, and your flesh is cringing, waiting to be torn from your bones…’
Ned was sweating as he told her; trembling from head to foot.
‘But you keep on, Simmie! You have to keep on because the rest expect it…and someone’s shouting – it’s you shouting: “Close up there! Mind the wire!” But no one can hear your voice because the noise is like a hurricane – roaring, whining for your blood; beating the thoughts from your brain! The ground is heaving under you. You’re stumbling, falling into shell holes with steel briars clutching, tearing at your clothing…
You keep on because they’re still behind you, trusting you to lead them through…
But when you reach it, Simmie – when you reach the German line, there’s nothing there but piles of earth and chalk, and heaps of… mangled heaps of blood and fabric… nothing there worth having… nowhere there to hide…’
‘Ned, dear! You’re overwrought. It’s been so dreadful for you. Dreadful! But it’s over for you now, my dear. You have done more than anyone could ask of you – and now you must look forward, you and Meriel. You need to plan for when the war is…’
‘But when you turn back – when you reach your own line, Simmie. When you look to see who’s there… half, more than half of them have gone! They’ve gone!
‘You’ve left them in the mud or in the wire – left them to the rats and magpies… The whole thing’s been a waste; a TOTAL BLOODY WASTE! But you can’t say so, can you? Nobody can say so…
‘Later on they’ll march you back into the caves – what’s left of you. You’ll have a bath to wash away the mud. They’ll put you on fatigue duties behind the line while the Brass decide where they will send you next. And you can’t imagine you could ever… you could ever go through that again. But there’s no choice, because they’ll send you back quite soon. They’ll send you somewhere different on the line so you can’t tell if you have gained or lost. They’ll wind you up again, and point you at the Bosche again…
‘And you keep on because the men expect it…because they’re the best, the very best… because the only honour in the whole bloody mess of it is the honour due to those brave boys. And you feel closer to them somehow than you have ever felt to anyone – even to a lover, Simmie, even naked in a bed.’
She flushed at that.
‘But Meriel needs you, your boys need you too, Ned,’ she put in quickly. ‘If you had seen her as I saw her on the way down to Seaford to fetch you home, I think that even you’d have been surprised, my dear. She throws up such a smoke-screen, doesn’t she? It’s often hard to tell what she is feeling – to realise that she needs love and reassurance as much as anyone; as much as you do, Ned, and maybe even more?’
Which meant that she had missed it, missed the point completely. When he looked across the gate at Simmie in her hopeless hat and London coat, with her fine hair in its usual state and her sweet, uncomprehending face doing its best to frown, Ned realised the impossibility of making her understand. Or any of them – ever.
‘The war will be over soon. I’m certain it will. Then you’ll be able to settle down again, and to forget.’ She leant over impulsively to lay a gentle palm against his cheek, in the wraith of a gesture he’d once made to her at Harpur Street, in Simmie’s parlour a million years ago. They both smiled at the memory.
‘Four black Very lights. Had you heard?’ he asked her bleakly. ‘That’s meant to be our signal for the war to end.’
From behind the window of the Bury library, Ned followed the leisurely progress of a heron slowly rising into the upper air. The hills across the combe still glowed as if the chalk within them had some luminous quality of its own. But the lower ponds from which the heron had just come had long since fallen into shadow. The flocks would be returning home soon, with old Bat plodding on behind them – and as he turned back from the window, Ned saw the confirmation of his own thought in the wagging stump of Puck’s short tail.
‘All right then old fellow, let’s go up and give the man a hand. The books can wait a bit I daresay, and we could both do with the exercise.’
Outside on the drive a couple of cock blackbirds were sparring noisily amongst the fallen leaves. There were still scarlet rosehips and grey beards of clematis on the shrubs of the lower slopes. But the first frosts had cleared the hills of wildflowers, and the butterflies, the merry little blues, were dormant now in chrysalids beneath the grass stems. With the harvest safely in, Shad had begun to plough up the old Rough with Ab’ram, Shem, Caesar and Flook, the one working team that still remained. The new furrows showed pale across the valley, speckled with flint and chalk; and Ned doubted privately if Meri’s rye-grass ley would take well on the slope. If the land had been worth salvaging, he thought, it was unlikely that Grandfather Ashby would have let it tumble down to couch. But Meri, who would not be told, would discover that soon enough with her first crop of thistles in the spring!
The ewes and tegs were sharing their grazing with flocks of starlings and migrating shore birds – dotterels and sandpipers, busily collecting the invertebrates the sheep exposed. Arable encroachments and trends towards a larger type of lowland sheep had reduced the Southdown flocks significantly since the beginning of the war. But not here in Sellington where Bat still ruled supreme. The old shepherd never waved or moved to greet you when you visited his downland kingdom; and seeing him standing there so patiently in his ancient weather hat and cloak, Ned knew suddenly why he had come and what it was he needed from the old man.
‘Bat.’
‘Mus Ned.’ A jerking Sussex nod and brief glance from the deepset grey eyes, while Bat’s old bobtail silently exposed her fangs at the inoffensive Puck.
‘Thought you might like a hand to bring ’em down, now that you and Lass are on your own?’
They both knew the offer to be specious. For although the shepherd had lost his teg boy and his grandson Jemmy, both on the first day of the Somme, he’d coped alone before and since without apparent difficulty. So the second nod had been for form’s sake only.
‘Bat, I want to tell you why I’ve got to go back to the war, and see if you can understand. Because I’m damned sure no one else will.’
The sagacious grey eyes looked out steadfastly across the valley, waiting still.
‘I feel an obligation to the men who’re over there.’ Ned pointed out across the Channel. ‘The best chance most of them will have of seeing Blighty now is to get wounded. If they’re really lucky and lose an arm or a leg, they might even be allowed to stay at home like me. Because that’s what they all want; a nice Blighty one to send them home. They dream about places like Sellington, talk about them all the time. But they have to stay and fight because they have no choice, you see?’
‘Yus Mus Ned, reckon I do.’
‘When they sent me home Bat, none of them begrudged it. They all said they were sorry about my father, as if death wasn’t all around them – and slapped me on the back, and told me to give their love to the old white cliffs.’
Ned swallowed, bent to pick up a piece of chalk, and juggled it from hand to hand. ‘There’s another big show brewing over there Bat, that’s what they’re saying – maybe the biggest show of all, the final push. And I just don’t think that I could bear for them to finish it without me. I have to be there. Does that sound daft?’
Waiting for the old shepherd to answer was like waiting for the hills themselves to speak. The chalk pebble was already sticky with his sweat; and Ned hurled it from him far into the valley. They both watched it fall.
‘Nope.’ Bat watched the missile drop out of sunlight into shadow, then followed it with a thin stream of spit. ‘No dafter anyways, than settin’ still. Now then, I never did ’old wiv anybuddy jackin’ in a job ’afore it were ’arf finished. Don’t matter what it is; ’tain’t the way an’ never was.’ The old man’s far-sighted gaze contracted from the flight of the chalk while he reached for an appropriate proverb.
‘If I ’ad store, by sheep an’ fold I’d give yer gold, Mus Ned. But since I’m poor, by crook an’ bell I’ll wish ye well. You be right ’nough, boy!’
Bat had always been a man for maxims. But he very rarely smiled; and as he did so now to reveal a crooked collection of tombstone teeth between expanses of pink gum, a sudden gust of wind ruffled the fleeces of the sheep on the slope above them, and sent the shore birds flapping up into the air.