The Brother

There was a bed of pampas grass in the corner of the garden. In the slightest breeze it made a dry noise like grasshoppers. Harriet and her brother used to pull it up for assegais.

Armed with the feathery spears they both trotted lightly through the orchard and past the kitchen garden to the chicken encampment. There they flung their spears over the wire netting and sent the British scuttling away.

‘We’ve scared them off!’ said Lionel. ‘But they’ll be back with reinforcements.’

Harriet followed her brother back through the trees. Lionel bent and picked up a couple of half-rotten apples to throw at the retreating enemy. Harriet did the same, carefully looking out for wasps.

Fallen horse-chestnut leaves lay in drifts, each leaf like a hand. Harriet tore the dry brown from the fingered leaf to reveal bare veins.

‘No use for weapons or anything,’ said Lionel, kicking the piles about.

‘Could be some sort of fodder for our horses or something…’

‘Yes, that’s why they’re called horse-chestnut leaves,’ Lionel decided. ‘See if they like the fodder,’ he ordered.

‘Yes, they do.’ Harriet wiped her hands on her dress.

‘It’s the War of the Roses now,’ said Lionel, mounting his horse. ‘Come on.’

They rode over to the cover of the walnut tree and tied their horses to its trunk. The black leaves underfoot smelled strong like tobacco. The walnut cases were tough and black too, like dark leather. Inside the clean shell was the nut, hardly ripe enough to eat.

‘Walnuts look like people’s brains,’ said Harriet.

‘They are the brains of the enemy. You crush them like this. Look.’ He stamped on the fallen walnuts as hard as he could.

‘You’re not crushing them.’

‘I’ll get a weapon.’

‘Listen,’ said Harriet. ‘Listen.’

Lionel was trying to prise a big mossy stone out of the earth.

‘Listen,’ said Harriet. ‘Daddy is calling you to go into the house.’

Lionel left the stone and rode off, tightening the reins on his horse and making a whinnying noise.

Harriet picked up a walnut and put it in her cardigan pocket. Years later she learned, while reading mediaeval history at university, that the walnut signified Christ: the nutritious kernel his divine nature, the outer peel his humanity, and the shell between his cross.

She wandered off, forgetting about her horse tied to the tree, and waited on the swing, pushing herself higher and higher.

After a while Lionel came running, full of pure excitement and happiness. ‘There’s a war on,’ he said. ‘They’re listening to the broadcast. The King’s going to speak. Hurry up.’

They ran up the bank to the French windows which were slightly open. The sun had not reached this part of the house and the grass was still wet.

Inside the room the curtains were drawn, although it was still daylight. The grown-ups stood around the wireless set, their shadowed heads touching the ceiling like people on stilts, as if they belonged somewhere else. As if they were ready to set off to another place on their stilts – somewhere they had never been.

But later the men came out and dug a deep trench in the garden. They dug up the rose bushes and threw them on a pile, the roots bare like naked forked people.

The trench digging had got down to clay and water.

‘When the enemy drops bombs we will just get in the trench,’ said Lionel. He saddled his horse and rode around, inspecting the work the men had done.

The second winter of the war was bitter cold, snow falling on frozen, impacted snow. A hotel in the market place had been commandeered by the army for the Forces Centre. A chandelier, or what was left of it, hung in the foyer. A soldier was asleep on the staircase. Others sat on the stairs in ones and twos; smoking, chatting, heads together. It was as if they were waiting for the performance to begin in the well of the foyer. They watched other soldiers milling about – soldiers that were bandaged and had red stains on their bandages. These had been on manoeuvres and were only playing at war. Others were dead – the ones with crosses on their foreheads and black armbands. They had all come in from the cold: the wounded and the dead.

Lionel and Harriet had come in from the cold too. The hotel was the only warm place to be had. They went upstairs to the empty music room. It was always empty, as were the library and reading room. Any soldiers were in the bar and so Harriet and Lionel had the place to themselves. They usually played records on the gramophone. The music room had nothing in it except a grand piano and a gramophone. It had been the hotel’s ballroom.

Occasionally the officer in charge of the centre looked in and then withdrew apologetically. He did not mind having two children in the place playing music. One of the records was ‘A Night on the Bare Mountain’, and another ‘Pavane for a Dead Princess’. There were six records, one of them cracked so you had to push the needle on firmly.

Lionel and Harriet sometimes danced the pavane on the ballroom floor and looked out of the beautiful long windows onto the square below where there was a war memorial: a statue of a young soldier, arms reversed, leaning on his rifle. It was shrouded in the thickly falling snow.

‘If you were killed they wouldn’t put up a statue. Only if you’re a soldier killed in war. Would you like a statue of yourself?’ said Harriet.

‘No. If I had to die I’d rather look across this square, look at the snow falling down, look at everything and listen to the music, this bit now, listen, and then die quick before I forgot it all.’

Lionel flung himself on the floor and lay very still for a long time. Perhaps as much as two minutes.

The road had settled into the dusty boredom of peace time. Lionel and Harriet propped their bicycles against the broken wall of one of the houses.

‘It was a horrible house. It deserved to be bombed.’ Lionel did a sort of war dance in the road and made Harriet laugh.

‘It was years ago. It looks the same,’ she said.

The doors off, the windows just gaping holes. Smashed glass everywhere.

‘There used to be roses,’ she reminded her brother. ‘It was smothered in them at this time of year. Pink, splashed with white. Rosa Mundi.’

‘Yes, the house was called Roseville because of the bloody roses, I suppose.’

‘Why does it all look the same?’ She meant the same as when it had taken the blast from a nearby hit. A man had been killed, someone who had gone to work in the timber yard very early that beautiful June morning. Years ago.

A man killed. And others in the churchyard had been disinterred on that bright morning in early summer, scattering bones among the buttercups and daisies.

But here was the house now, still covered in dust, looking just the same as the day they had fled it.

‘Let’s look inside,’ said Lionel.

‘It’s not safe,’ Harriet told him.

For once he took notice of her and instead picked up a bit of broken window frame and lobbed it like a grenade into the gaping window.

A man came out, covered in white dust from head to toe. ‘What do you want?’ he asked.

‘We don’t want anything,’ Harriet said. She stared at his white ghost face.

‘We used to live in this house,’ said Lionel. ‘There was a bomb at the end of the road during the war. A man was killed just over there.’ He pointed.

This man had no interest in their story. Without another word he turned and went back into the house.

‘Let’s go and get some tea,’ said Lionel. They went to a gloomy café and drank strong tea and ate anchovy fish paste sandwiches. The ennui of peace time lifted as they remembered how the children had collected human bones as well as shrapnel that day.

Treasures all.

‘Go out and buy lots of red roses. The best they have. Lots of them.’

Harriet went and found the place where the barrow boys had the very best flowers. She bought three dozen red roses. The young man who served her cut down the long stems and stripped the thorns, wrapped the flowers and then flung the money she gave him into the cash box with a flick of his wrist. Only stopping to buy a newspaper, Harriet hurried back to Lionel.

‘They’re beautiful. Put them by the window where the light will shine through them. When the nurse comes she’ll like to see them.’

‘Is she the one who couldn’t get in last time?’

‘No, that’s the district nurse. Don’t let her in; I think she’s Oliver Cromwell come back as a nurse. This one is quite pretty. I think I’ll ask her to make me a cup of tea.’

‘I’ll go out when she comes. There’s a book launch thing up the road.’

‘They’re always having them. Yes, you go. You’ll like it. When you come back you can make me a rice pudding.’

‘I brought some windfall apples for a tart.’

‘Good, that sounds nice. I’m glad you’re here, Harriet.’ Lionel folded his newspaper to the crossword and prepared to wait for the nurse.

Harriet went to the book launch, but the outside world itself was beginning to seem fictitious.

When she got back Lionel told her that the nurse had been but had not wanted to make him a cup of tea. ‘It’s not my job,’ she’d said.

‘Of course it is,’ Lionel had told her. ‘It’s my job to die bravely and it’s your job to look after me and do as I ask, including making me a cup of tea.’

‘Well, she obviously did in the end,’ Harriet said.

‘Yes. But don’t encourage her up here again. Tell me about the book launch.’

‘He was an Indian. The book is about his childhood – he was brought up in England. Anyway, I thought you said she was pretty, the nurse.’

‘India was wonderful,’ said Lionel. ‘That’s where I learned to ride a horse, up in the hills. My only experience of soldiering – India – I loved it.’ He smiled a glad smile and returned to his crossword. ‘She’s got nice hair,’ he added. ‘She should get it properly cut though.’

‘Did you tell her?’

‘No. I would have done if she’d been nicer about the tea.’

Harriet went into the kitchen, found some music on the radio, and washed her hands. She peeled the apples and sprinkled a few cloves over them. The name, she thought, came from the Latin clavus and referred to the hammered-flat mediaeval nails – and the crucifixion.

There was a place beside the cathedral where, during the war, the blast from a landmine had made a huge crater and blown out the stained glass of the cathedral windows. This place was hallowed and set aside for the cremated ashes of the dead.

The verger dug a hole and poured Lionel’s ashes into it. They made a dry sound like grasshoppers.

As it happened, old men were passing on the way out of the cathedral. They walked with sticks and were weighed down with medals. It was Trafalgar day and they had been to praise the battle and claim once more the victory.

The only thing to do now was to go home. It was a pity she had no garden, for that’s where she wanted to be – in a garden of her own. Even a small garden would do. She had passed one on the way here this morning, with scarlet pimpernels among the stones, and marigolds scattered.

Thinking everyone must have gone by now, she began to make her way up the flight of steps called the Dean’s Staircase. But not everyone had gone. She was followed by a thin man in a shabby raincoat. He had no medals pinned to it that she could see, and his coat was held together with safety pins.

He caught up with her despite her increased pace, and began to walk beside her.

‘What do you think of it?’ he asked her. His voice was clear but mellifluous.

‘Think of what?’

‘Well, the whole thing.’

She didn’t know what he meant. The Trafalgar service which she did not attend? The weather? Life? He could not have known about Lionel’s ashes, there had been only the verger with her. Everyone else had been packed into the cathedral singing war-like hymns.

‘I always come up this way,’ the man said in his soft, rich voice. ‘I count the steps every time. That’s what I do.’ He gave a little laugh. It sounded quite merry.

It might have been polite to ask about the steps – how many there were, for example. Perhaps he wanted her to ask questions, but she refrained.

‘There are a lot of trees around here,’ she said.

‘Have you been in the Bishop’s garden? The trees there are very old. Oaks. Chestnuts. There is a very old walnut tree; it’s quite famous. I’m going there now. It’s not far.’

She followed the man through a stone archway into the Bishop’s garden. He led her straight to the walnut tree. She could smell last year’s leaves and the leathery cases of the nuts, smelling of tobacco. They picked up one or two nuts from the ground and cracked them open, crushing them together. They picked out the kernels and ate them, scattering the shells on the ground.