MY HOLIDAY WITH FRANCIS ended on the 4th of August 1914, when Asquith stood up in the House of Commons to loud cheers and announced that, as a consequence of a treaty signed in 1839 guaranteeing Belgium sovereignty, Britain would be at war with Germany from midnight. The final declaration of war had become so inevitable—that ultimatum that Kaiser Willy would reject as a scrap of paper—that I can’t actually remember how we finally heard of it. We’d certainly left our cottage on the shore far behind, and had cycled on from the Gulf of Corryvreckan. I do remember, though, the pub that Francis and I were in that evening, the wild sense of excitement and relief. Suddenly, we were no longer strangers to these wary, courteous people, even though we were English and could hardly understand what they were saying. And the women were in the bar that night, too, drinking beer from jugs as their children whooped and charged up and down the road in the wild darkness outside. It was as if we had all craved this moment; at last, a chance to forget our differences and belong. Suddenly, after years of trying, we could love each other and hate the Germans. Politics and diplomacy seemed trivial compared to the raw certainties of war.
“I’m going, you know,” Francis yelled to me from across a table as a huge-breasted woman tried to kiss him. “I’m not waiting, Griff. I need to go straight back…”
I nodded and swallowed my beer. It was no use arguing. And I, too, was elated—it was impossible not to be. Soon, we were dancing in the crowd. Francis even kissed me. That August night, nobody cared. We were all one mass of hope and humanity.
We arranged to have our bicycles delivered back to Ballachulish and our return tickets changed, and ended up spending what was to be our last proper night together in a ridiculously smart hotel in Inveraray as we competed for priority with everyone else who suddenly needed to travel. I had had time by then to ponder how little I really knew about Francis. For a start, he’d always been deliberately vague about his upbringing. I didn’t even know where he’d been born and brought up.
“That’s never bothered me,” he said when I finally raised it with him. “So why should it bother you?” We were together in our plush double room with bathroom en-suite. We were both a little drunk. We had stopped worrying, in this new wartime world, about prying eyes and we were naked already, lying on the bed with the windows open and the sound of carriages clopping by in the street. Without ceremony, he began to kiss me. It was a good way to stop a conversation. But I sensed that it was too late to get my Francis back—the real Francis, as I thought of him—because so much of him had already left.
Even without the war, our love wouldn’t have lasted, I already had too many questions. Where, for example, had Francis acquired all his sweet proficiency in all the skills of homosexual love? How was it that, with me aged 34 and him just 19, I was the pupil and he was the teacher? A part of me doubted that Francis was wholly committed to spending his life being touched only by men. In truth, I was already well on the way towards becoming that perennially dreadful specimen; the jealous older lover.
On our journey south from the Highlands, following a more complex route than the one we had taken up—and without access to a sleeping carriage—I did my best to talk seriously to Francis. I wanted to fix as much of him in my mind as I could. But he remained teasing about his past. Yes, I went to school but it was just a place. How do you think I learned? Do I have a brother?—well, you tell me. Go on, you know what I’m like, so guess… It was a game we’d played before, but now it was harsher, more hurtful.
As we waited on swarming platforms and changed trains and searched for seats and stood in crowded corridors rattling down past Motherwell, Selkirk, Hexham, Darlington, I ended up telling Francis about myself instead. It had never struck me before that there was much to say, but then I had my book, of course, which already had more to do with me and my own frail hopes and ambitions than it had to do with the study of history. And there was being the way I am—a phrase I’d often used in my head but had never been able to speak out loud to anyone. I even told Francis about my dream of Oxford, which seemed like the most intimate thing I could ever tell anyone.
“So, Griff,” he smiled and secretly touched my hand as we leaned against a corridors windows and the sleepers raced by. “You want to be a Professor?”
I couldn’t answer. It was so much more than that.
“Have you ever even been to Oxford?”
“It would spoil the dream.”
“Still, I doubt if it’s all that it’s cracked up to be. People can be thick and snobbish and still tell each other jokes in Latin, you know. But it’ll be different after the War, Griff. You’ll see. Things will change…”
I smiled back at Francis’s hopeful face as the train rocked us towards our separate destinies, wondering if this wasn’t another small thread in the missing pattern of his life. A cold middle-class childhood—perhaps in Suffolk or Norfolk—then some small public boarding school, followed by expulsion for a sexual misdemeanour? Attempting Responsions at Oxford; perhaps even passing, but not quite well enough to get into a college…?
Despite my willing them not to come, Birmingham’s Snow Hill Station and then Lichfield City arrived soon enough. It was one of those overcast days that you often seem to get when you return from somewhere, new union jacks were drooping from many of the shops and churches and there was a chilly restlessness in the air like the snatching of some minor breeze, but otherwise everything about Lichfield seemed much the same. Francis and I parted by a wall outside the station without touching, or even saying very much. I think Francis’s last words to me were “Cheerio then,” and mine were, “Well, thanks anyway.” Something like that. I stood and watched him walk off past the almshouses with that quick gait of his, then lugged my mother’s old suitcase down towards what I still thought of as her house. I was almost looking forward to solitude, a good cry, then back to my book by mid-evening.
A Recruitment Fair was in progress in Saint Martin’s Square. A brass band played as men queued up to join the Staffordshire Regiment on a be-ribboned stage beside the statue of Doctor Johnson. Jolly as a works outing, talking and laughing freely in the way that we British so seldom do, they beckoned me to join them. I shook my head and explained that I was a schoolmaster, and much too old. The way things were then, there was no animosity—it was looked upon as my loss. The same Fair must still have been in progress later on when Francis went down and signed away his life to the King.
That evening, I find another pub, its walls blazing white in a late spasm of sunlight amid the drystone fields. I get a curious satisfaction from gouging a line of bare metal along the Ladybird’s passenger side as I turn around the gatepost.
A woman in curlers in the tobacco-browned bar sends me up the stairs, then left and then up the next left again. After wrestling with the tricky geometric problem of getting the suitcase through the door into my slope-ceilinged top floor room, and, feeling sick and sweaty, I collapse on the bed and let the wheezing springs rock me like a sea. Then I’m doubled up, retching and gasping.
A blank period follows. When I awake, my chin is wet, my head throbs and slippery pools of piss and mucus lie around me. But I’m too weary to get up, or even burrow down into my suitcase to find another tablet. A warm angel fans my face, whispering of better things beyond the pain. I sense that, outside the window, through ripples of mist and grey long-angled sunlight and the laughing whoops of children, the summer twilight of this or some other day is fading.
A fist bangs at my door. Intent on not moving—on not doing anything apart from concentrating on the difficult business of breathing—I murmur a useless reply.
What passes for night in these high latitudes floats in. The sky at my window fades from pink to pale blue, then glows pink again. At some point, I manage to drag myself off the damp coverlet and actually climb into bed. I’m conscious for a while that I still have my shoes on. Voices murmur. A pain hardens inside me. Twisted the way I am, and in the hen-clucking light of what I suppose must be morning, I can see the spines of two books lying on the dusty glass-topped bedside table. The Bible, and John Arthur’s Collected Speeches, Volume IV, 1933–4.
There’s sunlight at my window. From downstairs, I can hear someone singing, pots banging. There is the faint smell of burnt fat and bacon frying; the smell, too, that comes from the leakage and dissolution of my body. At some point, I begin to cough again. This time, I am able to watch from a blessed distance as my pillows are rained with blood. I remind myself of who I am. At least, who I think I might be. My mind turns the worn-out gears of my unfinished book. Figures—no, wasn’t it Fingers?—of History. The pages wait. Now, where was I? There’s Napoleon, striding beneath baroque ceilings along the brass and velvet lines of nobodies at one of those ceremonies which the French love almost as much as the English. And there I am, waiting. The knife beneath my robes. I cough again. The knife twists. The moment falls. My hands are bloody.
Inner darkness, even when it finally seems to beckon, comes less easily than I’d imagined. Like some plate-spinning acrobat, I struggle from one blazing window of my consciousness to the next, trying hard to pull down all the shutters at once and get away from this place forever. But the shutters keep flying up, and the landscape beyond them is hurrying, roaring as the telegraph lines rise and fall, rise and fall. And there are voices, too. Little eeeks of disgust and the clatter of a mop bucket before I am prodded and tugged. I am lifted and dropped. My jaw is parted wide. Something long and thin is pushed past it.
When I finally awake, I discover that a nurse is leaning over me amid high green walls, echoes, and the smell and the cool crinkle of a rubber mattress. She smiles. Her pin-on watch and her EA badge wink in the light from a tall window.
Time passes. My nurse goes and comes again. Her blouse has short sleeves and I notice, as she plumps up my pillows and does painful and unaccountable things to bits of me, the golden wheatfields of down that lie across her arms, and her warm human scent as she leans over me. Smiling, she takes the tube that runs down my throat and gives it a playful wiggle. I’m sure that she truly loves me.
“You’re lucky to come through,” says my nurse as she sits beside me soon after the doctor, who has also assured me how lucky I am, has continued his tour of the wards. “Five years ago, Mr. Brook, there was no hospital here. They’d have had to have taken you all the way down to Stirling or maybe up to Inverness.” She smoothes the pleat of her skirt in the morning light. “I doubt you’d have made it.”
“I’m dying anyway. I have cancer.”
My nurse looks at me. “We don’t talk like that here. Haven’t you ever heard of remission?”
I nod. But no one’s ever said the word to me as if it might actually happen.
“So you were up on your holidays from Oxford, then?”
“I thought it would be a good chance to re-visit some old places… The North Western Highlands. The Summer Isles…Have you heard of the Summer Isles?”
She thinks for a moment as the open window above us brings birdsong and the scents of a garden. “Well, no. I’m not sure I have. But there are so many islands here. Of course, our boys have a lot of them now. For the exercises and the training before they go down to Sussex and Kent.”
“I found the Summer Isles on my old map—the one I brought with me from last time. And then on a poster. But they’re not on the new map I was given from the Automobile Association. It’s just blue sea as if they’d sunk or something. Look…” I struggle to sit up.
Her hand, supple, smelling faintly of baby oil and carbolic, strong as the weight of the sun, presses me down. “I wouldn’t bother yourself with that now, Mr. Brook. Save your energy. Have a rest.” She consults the watch on her pinafore. “For sure, these old maps are useless. There’s new roads now, Mr. Brook. New bridges like the one they’ve just opened across to Skye. Even new places like this one. If I were you, I should look to the future and throw away any old things you might have.”
She places her hands on her knees preparatory to getting up. From down the corridor comes a tinkling and a sigh of wheels.
“That’ll be the tea trolley.”
“Look,” I say quickly. “People were supposed to have been relocated up on those islands. Don’t you remember? Or perhaps you were too young then, still at school. We used to call them undesirables. There were gypsies, Irish expats, homosexuals, Jews…”
Her mouth tightens in a lemony scowl. She looks down at me, disappointed. “Mr. Brook—”
“—And there was a man I spoke to in… Some town. It was on one of the main roads. He told me about lorries like cattle trucks. Lorries with people inside them, they were…” I pause to cough. “Heading…” Another, more vicious this time, wracks me. “North…”
She has the rueful look on her face as I regain my breath that teachers reserve for basically decent but occasionally naughty children.
“As for those trucks, the Summer Isles, those stories of yours,” she says. “I’d put that down to experience if I were you. Here in the Highlands, Mr. Brook, if you go around asking the same question often enough, someone’s going to give you the answer they think you want to hear.” She touches my stubbled chin, ruffles what’s left of my hair. “Don’t you see? It was just a leg-pull…”
She stands up and walks down the ward through the bars of summer sunlight, humming.
Francis wrote me the occasional letter at first after he volunteered. Griff, you’d hardly know me now… I could almost see him trying on his new soldierly identity. The letters were filled at first with catalogues of acquaintances and military stupidities as he was posted around various training camps and temporary barracks in southern England. They grew shorter and blander once he reached France and the rapidly solidifying Western Front. I was like the millions of puzzled relatives and loved ones who were the recipients of such letters. I put his terseness down to shortage of time, and then to the military censors. But soon, by early 1915, Francis stopped writing to me altogether.
The War in Britain was a strange affair, like a fever. People were more sociable, strangers would talk to each other, and even I went out more often; to the theatre or to the music hall, or to one of the new cinematographs where we all laughed at Chaplin, wept for Lorna Doone and then sang along afterwards with the cartunes as a little ball of light danced across the screen. At school, I taught my lads about the many historic acts of German aggression, and had them compose outraged letters to the Kaiser about the Zeppelin bombings of Great Yarmouth.
Two years passed. I only learned about Francis by chance while I waited at Lichfield station to take the train to the Municipal Reference Library in Birmingham. Queuing for a copy of the Post from the John Menzies bookstall on Platform 1, already planning the research for my book, I suddenly thought I heard Francis’s name being spoken as the elderly lady in front purchased her packet of Brown’s Patent Cough Sweets. The staff here had changed many times since he’d left, and I was sure I was suffering from an auditory hallucination—the whispers of ghosts. But still, I found myself asking if there had been any word about Francis Eveleigh, who used to work here, as I handed over a penny for my paper.
I knew, then, what the woman at the counter was going to tell me. I knew from the change that came over her expression. It was a fainter echo of what I’d seen many times before since the War had started on the faces of teachers and mothers at school, and people you passed in the street and suddenly knew, knew without their saying, that you could no longer ask about their son, their husband, their brother. Francis had died in the Somme Offensive.
Pushed numbly into action, prodding and probing at the true facts of Francis Eveleigh’s life in a way that I had resisted before, I was able to track down his real home without too much difficulty. There was his old landlady. There was a postman who knew about a redirection order for his mail. Thus, on a winter evening late in 1916, following the directions that the station porter had given me down small antique streets that opened out into puddled fields, I met Francis’s father and mother.
The Eveleighs lived in a large house at the end of a long drive set in arable countryside just outside Louth in Lincolnshire. Standing on that cold day in my muddy shoes as quizzical light fanned from their hall, I introduced myself to the maid as a friend of his from Lichfield, and was ushered into the drawing room where Mr. and Mrs. Eveleigh stood still as china figures on either side of the unlit fire. It seemed as if they had been motionless for a long time, waiting there for me as the light greyed and their days swept by. Despite the seemingly tenuous connection, our association lasted until the end of the War. The hallway of their house always smelled of dog and galoshes—not that they ever had a dog—and whichever room you were in, you could always hear the panicky beat of several clocks. Mr. Eveleigh managed a bank; in those days it was still considered a gentleman’s profession. His wife (Francis’s eyes and pale skin, his full dark hair that she always tied back in a bun) oscillated between various groups and societies. They were so solid, so dependable, and I was flattered and charmed that they were prepared to have anything to do with me. Of course, Francis had refused all their offers since leaving home, although they knew that he had been living in some ghastly little room above a butcher’s in Lichfield. He had even refused, or so I was told, help with getting an officer’s commission when they heard that he had enlisted. From what little that the Eveleighs knew about their son’s life in Lichfield, I think that I, being a schoolteacher, older, a householder, and reasonably well-spoken, came as a reassurance. There was no hint, of course, that Francis and I had been lovers—or even that he’d had any kind of sexual life. But there was always a sense, somewhere amid all the weekends I was invited to the Eveleighs’ house, of a shared deeper fondness.
Whatever else happens in this century, better historians than I will use the War as a line to draw between what came before and what came after. Contrast and examine, if you will, the golden decadent evenings of the Edwardian Era (which I somehow seemed to miss) and the grimness and depression of the pre-Modernist Twenties (which I certainly didn’t). For me, though, the process was more insidious and gradual. The coursing anger which John Arthur rose upon and now attempts to control was already there long before the War ended. It was in me, and it was in Mr. and Mrs. Eveleigh.
The light was always grey at the Eveleigh’s house, and a chill came to whatever part of your body was turned from the fire. I must have been there several times in summer, yet in my memories the fields are shining brown, the skies are always filled with weepy clouds. Even when it wasn’t raining, I would come back sodden from my solitary walks across the low wet hills and between the dripping hedgerows. The clocks ticked and the cold fire spat as we sat in the dining room for meals of boiled cabbage, boiled potatoes and boiled bacon. It wasn’t hard to see why Francis had run away.
Being aspirantly middle class, which meant something more exclusive in those days, I found it easy enough to fit in. And there was always the pleasure of being able to sleep in Francis’s own childhood bed which still bore the imprint of his body, to slide open drawers that contained the starched uniforms of the various cheap public schools he had been forced to attend and bury my face in their folds. I was introduced to supposed childhood playmates as dear Francis’s best friend. No one blamed me for the fact that he had left them, and died as an ordinary Tommy. I was an honourary member of the Eveleigh family.
Striding out with me across the soggy lawns at the back of the house, prodding his walking stick angrily at mole hills as the rooks cawed and circled the misty oaks, Mr. Eveleigh would talk endlessly about the War.
“Tell me, as a historian, Brooke,” he’d begin—a phrase which would get anyone on my good side—and then he’d ask whether I thought tanks or airships or aeroplanes or some new kind of poison gas or bullet would finally bring about victory. His biggest fear was that it would all fizzle out as suddenly as it had began; with everyone saving face in some meaningless treaty. Even though Francis was seldom mentioned, the sub-text of all of this was that Mr. Eveleigh wanted the War to have a proper conclusion that would make sense of his son’s death.
Mr. Eveleigh asked me about the Jews; whether I didn’t think they were involved in a conspiracy to set one half of Europe against the other. I think he may have even mentioned dumping the buggers on some remote Scottish island and leaving them to get on with it. He explored the possibility that the feeble French Army had dragged us into the Somme Offensive. He asked me if I agreed that the average working man was fundamentally lazy, and probably no better at getting the job done in the battlefield than he was in the factory—hence the damnably long time this whole business was taking. He wondered, now that crime and conspiracy were clearly so rife, if it wasn’t time for the Home Secretary to introduce much harsher measures. He mused upon the loyalties and motives of the nation’s young women, the dreadful, unfeminine clothes they’d taken to wearing. He doubted whether democracy was really the best way of running the country now that every Tom, Dick and Harry had been given the vote, and asked me if I agreed with him that Lloyd George, for all his bluster, was probably just a Welsh windbag—and that what this country really needed was a true, strong leader…
In fact, Mr. Eveleigh said the kind of things that we British had always been saying. I’d heard them often enough before from old ladies on the backs of trams and prim couples at school parents’ evenings, and I’d read them in editorials in the Mirror and the Express. So I generally found myself agreeing with Mr. Eveleigh to save the bother of arguing. He was one of those people, anyway, who imagine that everyone shares their values. On the few occasions that I attempted to argue as we strode about that soggy lawn, he didn’t really notice.
Mrs. Eveleigh, of course, held no political opinions, other than that the Germans routinely raped nuns. She kept herself to herself, and by mid-evening smelled sweetly of sherry.
The last time I saw them both was after the French Capitulation, when the initial cease-fire treaty had been signed in Paris. I remember that my train journey up through Peterborough and Lincoln took place in an atmosphere that was as feverish as it had been four years before—but also very different. Strangers were talking to strangers again, but their voices were confused, their faces were hard and angry. Someone tried to start a fight with me as I went down the corridor to the buffet carriage, tapping my shoulder and pressing me against the condensation-streaked glass as he yelled obscenities in my face. Through the benefit of my almost frictionless life, I looked young enough at 36 to have volunteered. Indeed, I could have sacrificed my reserved occupation during the War’s later stages and done so.
There was talk already of Lloyd George’s resignation and of a General Election, although since all the major parties—and most people—had all supported the War, no one had any clear idea of what the campaign would be about. There were more people than usual milling around as I lugged my suitcase through the rainy streets of Louth. Shouts came from the pubs, and no one seemed to be working. Women and children cringed in doorways; fearing, no doubt, the beating they’d get later on. Unattended dogs howled. The posters and the flags that had hung out for most of the War—RED CROSS OR IRON CROSS? WHAT DID YOU DO IN THE WAR DADDY? YOUR COUNTRY NEEDS YOU. IT IS FAR BETTER TO FACE THE BULLETS THAN BE KILLED AT HOME BY A BOMB—suddenly looked sad and faded. But I didn’t see one proper fight, and only one broken window. The English, the British Way is to remain polite and say little: to try hard, even in defeat, to be sensible and positive.
I brought one of the few papers that were left at a newsagents and stared at a headline. WAR OVER. ALLIES DEFEATED. It was 6 August 1918; a day, it seemed to me, that was too ordinary to bear this indignity, and would never look right in the cold pristine pages of history. Like everyone else, I simply couldn’t believe it.
The Eveleighs were holding a sort of open house that day. The front door—was wide open. It seemed to me a bizarre touch: final confirmation that everything had changed. People were milling. There were clients from the bank, friends from the bridge circle, farmers and neighbours. All were red-faced and talking loudly. I remember that the usually neat rugs were rucked-up, that the tiled floors were swirled with mud. Mr. Eveleigh was moving from group to group, dispensing sherry and port, and Mrs. Eveleigh was sitting in her usual corner, smiling tightly with a glass clenched in her trembling hands. Outside, beyond the misted windows, molehills still dotted the lawn. The rooks still circled and cawed.
Time passed. Voices grew louder, then began to fade. Someone was surreptitiously sick in the scullery sink. One of the maids passing around sausage rolls chose the moment to give her notice. People began to drift unsteadily up the drive as darkness settled.
I had, I suppose, as much reason as anyone to want to drown my sorrows, and I went through the same alcoholic cycle of loud sociability followed by depression. I was tired and I had a headache by the time the remaining maids had cleared things up and I and Mr. and Mrs. Eveleigh found ourselves suddenly alone. Still, Mr. Eveleigh insisted as he always did in talking to me in the chilly firelit parlour whilst Mrs. Eveleigh continued to sip sherry in her corner. He spread a News Chronicle map of Belgium and France across the leather-topped table and weighed down each corner with the clumsy patience of the inebriated, then asked me to explain to him exactly who was to blame for this mess.
I did my polite best. I was as surprised as everyone else at the suddenness of our defeat, but even now with our soldiers stuck bootless and weaponless in POW holding camps, I could feel the wisdom of hindsight creeping in. No doubt making less sense than I imagined, I explained to Mr. Eveleigh how the economies of all the nations had been seriously weakened by the War: how, politically, its continued conduct was becoming unsustainable. Something was bound to give. It had already happened in Russia with the Revolution which, much more than losing the War, was every other European leader’s worst nightmare. And the Bolsheviks’ treaty had been a capitulation, allowing the Germans to strengthen their morale as they moved all their forces to the Western Front.
For once, Ludendorff’s plan to attack at Arras where the French and the British forces met was well-conceived. At long last, as even Haig had shown, both sets of commanders had begun to learn from the mistakes of their campaigns. Once a break had been made in the Allied lines, the Germans used flexible tactics of bursting ahead where resistance was weakest, pausing for the artillery, then pushing quickly on again. The American reinforcements, long-promised, much talked-about, were too few, and came too late. Predictably, whilst the British turned towards the Channel Coast, the French retreated towards Paris. With Haig barely on speaking terms with Lloyd George, and smarting at being second-in-command to the French, the Allied crisis soon became absolute.
As the Germans advanced, the lost certainties of trench warfare, despite all the horrors, seemed almost reassuring. After four years of deadlock, the War was suddenly about movement, communications, swiftness of advance. With Paris succumbing because neither side wanted her pounded to rubble, and the British and Colonial Forces clustered chaotically around Cherbourg and Dieppe, there was nothing left to do but admit defeat, and hope that the Germans would be magnanimous in victory.
“I should never have opened those port bottles I laid down,” Mr. Eveleigh said, swaying as he poured me another whisky. “I mean, we can’t leave it like this, can we? Betrayed by the Yanks and the French, beaten by the bloody Germans. There’ll have to be another war. Things aren’t sorted out yet…”
Later, Mrs. Eveleigh showed me up to my room. It was oddly quiet; all the clocks had stopped ticking today because no one had remembered to wind them. But she seemed composed as she lit the gas lantern and then sifted through Francis’s old chest of drawers.
“You might as well have these,” she said, giving me a child’s exercise book with Francis’s name on the cover, then a couple of battered tin toys. “If you want them, that is. Something to remember him by…” She pulled open the long wardrobe, stirring the dark clothes, bringing a wash of stale Francis air. “Will you look at that—just one shoe! How can there be only one shoe down there? They don’t go off on their own, do they? Not that I suppose it matters…”
I watched as she did what I had done many times; touching Francis’s old coats and jackets, feeling in the pockets, which contained only gritty dust. I, at my weekends here, had already taken my secret share of bits of Francis-this and Francis-that, the rattier and more used by him the better. An old jumper. That missing shoe.
“Oh, and there’s something else,” she said, closing the wardrobe again, spinning around, her fingers at her mouth in an uncharacteristic state of excitement. I sat and waited as she left the room and returned bearing a thick cardboard box with a War Office stamp on it, and a sticker beneath bearing the words: S2242 RIFLEMAN FRANCIS EVELEIGH, C COMPANY, 8TH SERVICE BATTALION, THE RIFLE BRIGADE. It still felt odd to think of him like that.
She lifted it open, filling the room with some faint other smell. What was it? Mud? Death? It was certainly unpleasant. “Well,” Mrs. Eveleigh gestured at the open box and I noticed that she was breathing rapidly, far closer than I was to tears. “You might as well have a look and see if there’s anything. After all, this is what Francis was when he died. A soldier…”
It proved to be half empty—as if someone had been through it and stolen the best bits already—although I supposed this was because these boxes came in a standard size and there sometimes wasn’t enough to fill them. There was that cheap edition of News From Nowhere, the pages splayed with damp, that Francis had been reading up in the Highlands and had probably, Francis being Francis, never got around to finishing. A pair of thick standard issue grey-green military socks, I suppose they must have been a spare; or thrown in to make the emptiness seem more substantial. They felt slickly damp when I touched them, but that was probably from the atmosphere in this house. More odd was the pistol. It seemed well-kept and in working order, although empty of bullets. Mrs. Eveleigh just gazed down at me as I sat on the bed and handled the thing. Clicking back the hammer. I wondered if, as a private, Francis would have been allowed to use it. Weren’t pistols for officers? So perhaps this was a memento of someone else, a friend or a lover who died in some earlier assault…
“Keep that too,” Mrs. Eveleigh said, something harsh in her voice. “I don’t want it.”
She was standing closer now. Like me, and in her own quiet way, I think she had passed into that grey hinterland that lies beyond an excess of drink. The time when everything seems normal again, and yet the world has become foul, and you are weary and filled with self-disgust.
I glanced around at the familiar wallpaper, the twee pictures, expecting her to turn and leave. But she just stood there in front of me, her hands knotting and unknotting across the long line of buttons that ran down her black dress.
“I only feel as though I’ve lost him now,” she said. “Before I knew we’d thrown away this War, it was always as if some part of him might still come back to me.”
I nodded, staring up at her, this twisted image of Francis as a middle-aged woman. Her eyes were lost in shadow; a shade deeper than black.
“And I wonder, even now, if he ever knew a woman.”
She took a step closer so that our knees touched. I was looking right up at her now, the rapid rise and fall of her breasts, the apertures of her nostrils, the lines of flesh under her chin. Beneath the sour dusty odour of her clothes, she even smelled a little like Francis: Francis if he’d been eating pickles, drinking sherry and gin.
“I never knew what he was like,” she said.
“He was…” I tensed my hands, feeling enclosed, threatened. But something snapped within me. All these evasions, the dishonesty. It finally broke. “I loved him, Mrs. Eveleigh. I just loved him…”
She took a step back and nodded severely. I had truly thought for a moment—had wanted, even—that she would kiss me: that we could somehow share our Francislessness together. But, instead, I covered my face in my hands and heard the sigh of her dress as she left the room, and the soft clunk of the door closing.
I crept out from the house early next morning, long before anyone was awake. I trudged through the darkness to the unlit station and sat waiting for the milk train.
The Eveleighs never wrote to me after that.
I never saw them again.