Two winds came off the north.
It was a day of bitter cold, clothes to be worn like weapons. Thomas coasted down the hill on his bicycle, past the deserted tearooms and dark little sea-shops of York Gate. Hardly a person about, only he and gulls on the jetty. In the night the gale had washed over it, left seaweed and huge shivering puddles. There were lobster pots, a lot of them, upturned rowing boats, and iron rings rusting in the walls. The jetty stuck out like a benevolent arm embracing half the beach and had been doing nothing different to that for half a thousand years. It was made of oak, tarred six inches deep, black as your hat with black gloss on the railings. By a process of gravity and nowhere else to go, everyone who visits Broadstairs will end up here, leaning over this balustrade and looking out to sea …
The tide was on the turn and conditions perfect, and Maurice as usual was late. Thomas watched a pair of cormorants flying fast just inches above the waves and, as they disappeared to fish, the sun threw sudden gold all over the sea. Shafts of light, pink and blue like a bomb blew out the side gate of heaven. But it didn’t last. By the time the birds resurfaced the clouds had closed and the sea was grey again.
He took out cigarettes and the wind made work of it, had to shelter a match in his jacket. He lit up, raising eyes. Not too far away a girl rode by on a new bicycle. It was red and obviously a Christmas present. She wore a fur hat, and Thomas was jealous of it, and a coat with fur at the collar, and he was jealous of that too.
It was Gwen.
As she cycled past she looked at him. Her eyes were intensely blue, blue as flowers, and sent a pulse through his head like sweet electricity. It was the first time she hadn’t looked away.
In the crisis of the moment it was Thomas who did, inhaling deep before looking back to blow his smoke in her direction. But he’d mistimed it, and Gwen was already gone …
You tell me of ecstasy
In our love’s complexity
But while loving me
Think who your next will be
He’d written it a week ago and liked it, except she didn’t tell him anything, and didn’t love him either. But she had looked at him. He wandered up the jetty smoking his cigarette thinking about the look. Why had she held the gaze like that? Maybe she didn’t recognise him, thought he was someone else? That was possible. After all, she barely acknowledged his existence, so how would she know it was him? The hypothesis evaporated as he constructed it. Of course she knew it was him. He barely looked at her either, but instantly knew it was her. He walked on through puddles trying to relive the moment. On the positive side, she must have seen him before he saw her, so there was no reason for her to look at him at all. How long did the look last? He stopped in two inches of water for calculations. With a blink at the beginning and end, he tried to reproduce the length of the look. This wasn’t successful. All he could remember were her eyes and that wisp of golden hair blowing across her face …
How could she be so beautiful, and how could beauty be so unkind? The fantasy was already decaying. He couldn’t think about Gwen without thinking of Shackles with his hand up her kilt. That was reality, and he didn’t want to think about that.
A last drag at the cigarette and he jettisoned it over the weather side of the pier. Just enough tide to take it. The beach stretching from here to North Foreland was as bleak as it had ever been. Dirty chalk cliffs collapsed haphazardly into the sands, white into green, and green into endless brown of the rock pools.
Thomas stared at them with a curious feeling of emptiness. He’d blown the shit out of these pools so many times, slaughtered without thought, but today, for some unfocused reason, he wasn’t sure he wanted to go on with it. A week or so ago he’d put a bead on a pigeon with his .22. It was a certain kill. He didn’t know why but he couldn’t snuff it, and the feeling he had then was the reticence he felt now.
The cruelty-to-crab season had opened some months ago – mid-October when the fireworks went on sale – and fizzled out late November when all the fireworks were gone. During the season the squads invaded the beaches, regiments of wicked boys with all the explosive they could afford. Thomas held them in contempt. They went about their business with ridiculous little crackers at a penny apiece – ‘Cannon Crashers’, ‘Thunderclaps’ – commercial rubbish all. Even so, for a month or more, unspeakable atrocities were inflicted on anything they happened to come across on the shoreline. Starfish, limpets, shellfish, were systematically routed out and destroyed. Mussels were atomised on the rocks, flat fish disembowelled as they slid in assumed safety across the shallow sands …
But the agonies of this lot were as nothing compared to the pogroms the squads directed at the crab. The crab was persecuted for a menu of reasons, not least the very quality that appeared to give it advantage over its neighbours. It had legs, therefore chance of escape, therefore could be ‘hunted’. No whelk would make a bolt for it, but the crab would run and fight while it had a leg or claw left to do it with.
There were other factors that worked to the crab’s disadvantage. It had eyes and could look at you. Better still, its multi-coloured interior made for an impressive reaction to explosives. When a crab went up there was a mess. A bull crab buckled like an armoured car, or a tank, and even the lousiest imagination could convert its smoking hulk into a catastrophe on some battlefield. And crabs were stupid. Were they not, the oafs that scoured the rocks for them would have had little success.
The animals they targeted were removed from the pools with hooks. There were two species of enemy: the smaller edibles, and big green bastards with claws the size of secateurs that could weigh up to a pound and a half. They were taken to the beaches where they usually collected a badly placed charge in the under-belly, followed by maiming, or if they were lucky, instant death. Those that survived with enough limbs intact to attempt escape were the most unfortunate creatures alive. A unit of hysterical boys would encircle the victim, stimulating its interior with injections of hissing phosphorus. Matches penetrated every fissure of its wrecked armour like explosive-head bullets, animating whatever was left inside either to get up and run or make a fight of it. Thomas had seen blasted crabs fencing for their lives for half an hour, twisting in the sand like unwinding springs, seizing the air with dislocated claws, and all the time dragging themselves in hopeless circles back towards the sea.
After the trauma of explosion a crab will grab at anything, scissoring off even its own limbs, should the blast have twisted a foreleg in the way. The more inventive of the squads capitalised on this phenomenon by offering the poor fucker an unexpected chance of freedom with a Cannon Crasher to take home to the wife and kids. With the fuse sizzling and death in its fist, it would haul for sanctuary as fast as a couple of legs could shift it. Not a great deal of imagination needed now: with exhaust streaming in its wake it really did look like a tank. Some seconds later it went up, massacred in its tracks, its horrible orange interior of rotten rubber bands blown all over its bomb-proof face.
‘Beauty,’ they screamed. ‘Beauty.’
But this was about as good as these thick-heads could get. They used torture and brutality to destroy their victims, whereas Thomas, and to a lesser degree Maurice, practised a combination of sophisticated techniques, undeniably as cruel, but with a bias towards strategy and science.
They were the cream of this game. The elite.
Maurice pitched up about ten minutes later, wore a wool hat with a white bobble, an anorak, and a rucksack on his back with half a dozen sticks thrust out of it. His nose was remarkably red.
‘We’re gonna miss the tide,’ said Thomas.
‘Sea’s looking slow.’
‘No it isn’t, it’s coming in.’
‘All right,’ said Maurice. ‘Let’s move it.’
He stashed his bike on top of Thomas’s and they clattered down wooden stairs that got more and more treacherous with seaweed. From down here the jetty looked like a black ship that never went anywhere. Gulls were motionless in the air, standing on the wind. As they crossed the beach, Maurice hooked his briar under dirty front teeth and he looked like a kind of mole.
‘I’ve got some sherry,’ he said, and reached over a shoulder into his rucksack, producing a half-full bottle of some fortified wine.
‘That’s not sherry,’ said Thomas.
‘What is it then?’
‘I dunno, but sherry’s not red.’
‘Isn’t it?’
‘Don’t you drink?’ said Thomas.
‘Course I drink.’
‘Don’t you drink sherry?’
‘Not much.’
‘Sherry’s yellow.’
‘Tastes like sherry,’ said Maurice, popping the cork. ‘Fuckin’ handy stuff.’
And he took a swig that snatched his breath away and handed the bottle across.
‘I only drink gin,’ said Thomas. ‘Or port, I’ll drink a port.’
‘This is port.’
‘You just said it was sherry.’
‘Yeah, well, I got it wrong, didn’t I? It’s port.’
It was offered again and declined again. In reality Thomas didn’t like the taste of booze, made him feel queasy, and on a day like this he didn’t like the cut of it, not with enough explosive in his coat to blow the pair of them to bits.
‘Not for me, not with this lot.’
He slapped hands on his pockets.
‘How many you got?’
‘Six, all deep water.’
‘We’ll do the town first,’ said Maurice.
Sand got scarce and turned into chalk and everything else was black flint. You needed the balance of an ape to move at speed on the rocks. Thin seaweed the colour of salads gave way to fat and oily brown stuff, slippery as ice. It spilled everywhere, yards long and full of blisters that popped when you trod on them. Here and there in advance of itself, the tide gnawed in through bottomless gullies and there were sudden secret pools.
They jumped them in convoy, Maurice in front, sucking at his pipe and navigating towards rocks that were already disappearing back into the sea.
The pools were deep here, morbid cisterns choked with weed, pouring water like overflowing baths. They selected a promontory that had but minutes left in it. Maurice shuffled free of his rucksack, dumped it at his feet and started to unload. First out was a ball of string followed by a fishing line, weighted at an end, with knots tied at intervals of about a foot. As he unwound he looked at Thomas with a smile that you might want to call a sneer.
‘I’ve got some news for you, you might well be interested in.’
‘Like what?’
‘Like I ran into Gwen Hackett at the top of York Street.’
Thomas used the salt wind to avoid his eyes, reached for the rucksack preparing for the worst.
‘She says, she thinks you’re sweet.’ He stuck out his tongue and wagged it lasciviously. ‘You’re in there, china.’
Thomas stared, feeling something peculiar in his head, like singing and confetti and apple-blossom and lipstick. Her sweet lips said ‘sweet’ and ‘sweet’ was him? He felt elation, he felt dizzy with joy, instant happiness that engulfed him and the whole wonderful world.
‘Fuck that,’ he said.
‘Don’t you care?’ said Maurice.
‘Not really.’
‘That’s good, coz I was lying.’
He cackled with repressed evil, grabbed the bag and went about the mechanics of assembling his launcher. It was made of three lengths of sawn-off vacuum-cleaner pipe that clicked together.
Thomas felt like throwing himself into the sea, to drown, there and then. The day was a funeral and Maurice a shit-house. How could he have said such a thing, even using the slang that Thomas had taught him? What kind of a friend was that?
The tide was beginning to creep around their feet, lifting the seaweed, swelling like breathing in the pools. Maurice found a platform for his device and knelt screwing his pipes to a wood frame with a wing nut. The final assembly projected not far off vertical, like a mortar-launcher. He looked across and knew perfectly what was going on behind Thomas’s lousy weather.
‘Only a joke,’ he said.
‘Yeah, very fucking funny.’
‘So, you do like her?’
‘You know I “like” her.’
Maurice elbowed the briar to get vile with his tongue again.
‘All right, keep your hair on,’ he said. ‘She did say it.’
‘Said what?’
‘Said what I said she said.’
Thomas didn’t believe him, might even say so.
‘Straight up,’ said Maurice. ‘By the holy balls of Jesus’ (on which he swore) ‘she said it.’
‘Did she?’ dared Thomas.
‘She did, and it’s bad news really, coz she’s the best-looking bird in school. Her fuckin’ loss, but she fancies you.’
‘How do you know?’
‘I can tell,’ said Maurice with the light authority of one with experience of this type of thing.
He popped the cork of his VP bottle and took another hit. Handed it to Thomas and this time he didn’t refuse. It tasted divine, hot and fantastic. It tasted of the moment, and this was the best moment of his life. He soared like a giant in the air, drunk on love and red sherry.
The sky split again, the sea was silver and gold again, it was heaven, and Thomas was in love with its nearest angel …
‘Got one.’
He turned into the wind, unaware of Maurice until he shouted from a pool some yards away. ‘Red Back,’ and he stood with a six-ounce crab above his head like a champion who won the cup.
‘Let’s do it,’ said Thomas.
Was there ever a day like this? They went about their task with enthusiasm. The crab was imprisoned in Maurice’s bag and he threw his sinker into a lugubrious trough that got deeper with every wave.
When Thomas worked the pools he thought in Morse, couldn’t help himself, it was part of the game …
–.. . .– –. – ....
‘Depth?’ he said.
‘Seven feet,’ said Maurice.
Thomas unwound about ten feet of string. His true china held the crab and it was secured in a harness like an expertly tied parcel. His Christmas knife trimmed loose ends, the knots slid tight, and no fucker got out of this.
With its mouth frothing and eyes waving about wondering what was going on, the enemy was returned to the pool. It took string with it, down into the deep where the broken seashells are. They gave it time now, a quiet period in which to reacclimatise, convince itself the trussing procedure was no more than an alarming close shave. At last on the bottom the panic was over, and it walked rather than ran into a safe corner of the sea.
Or so it might credibly think.
Up above the boys were at work. Maurice unwrapped his first rocket. These were hybrids, triple rocket heads clustered around one stick with ignition synchronised to a single magnesium fuse. The string connected to the crab was now connected to the rocket via a hole drilled in its stick. This bastard was capable of making thirty-six hundred feet whether crab-towing or not.
He carefully slid the rocket into the launching device and made final adjustments towards the town.
The wind was favourable.
.. – –. –. .. –.. ––––
‘Ignition.’
Maurice sucked his pipe like he was siphoning petrol, got a glow in the bowl. The fuse fired, then the rockets, perfect coincidence on all three.
For a moment it was static in its launcher, charring seaweed, clouds of khaki sulphur hauled off by the wind. It seemed the sea would anchor it for ever. ‘Go, go,’ howled Maurice. And then it was gone, with astonishing acceleration, the wretched edible snatched from its world of shrimp and green things, and travelling at two hundred miles an hour above Broadstairs.
‘Fuuuuccckkk,’ screamed Maurice. ‘Yea, they were snuffed.’
This sounded to Thomas like some kind of biblical reference. The crab disappeared over the cliffs on a trajectory parallel to the high street. (Later in the day they would survey the town on their bicycles in attempt to locate the victims. In the past not a few had been memorable. One was found halfway up Gladstone Road swinging above the dental surgery. Just a back with legs, it had been completely incinerated during flight. To their delight it looked like a set of hellish teeth. Others were discovered hanging over telephone wires, up trees in the park, and one, with everything intact, dangling like a loathsome arachnid from the flagpole of the Chandos Tearooms).
The tide had driven them back up the beach. All rockets and the sherry gone, but time enough for the depth-charges.
With the sea claiming everything, Maurice lowered his sounding-line into one of the last available pools. It kept going down. Meantime, Thomas shuffled his munitions: identical little pipes with external batteries bandaged into place with wire.
‘Whass the depth?’ he said.
‘What?’
‘Depth.’
‘Are you all right?’ said Maurice.
‘What d’you mean?’
‘You sound arse-holed.’
Thomas laughed, enjoying himself, and Maurice kept a wary eye on him as he hauled out.
‘It’s nine feet,’ he said, and by his expression, too deep.
‘We’ll have it,’ said Thomas, and he circled the pool scratching his arse as though calculating, although in reality he already knew precisely what he was going to do.
‘We’ll put down five hundred grams on a fifteen-second fuse.’
‘Five Hundred?’
‘That’s what I said,’ said Thomas, and he produced almost a foot of pipe from somewhere about his person.
‘What the fuck is that?’ said Maurice.
‘The big one.’
‘I thought you said you’d junked it?’
‘There’s been a variation of circumstance,’ said its inventor, but he wasn’t saying more than that. He was smiling again and felt kind of weird, thought of his grandfather and Gwen as one thought, a loving thought, but it was his grandfather who finally took it, probably because he was going into hospital today …
‘You know what?’
‘What?’ said Maurice.
‘What happened to my photographs?’
‘Forgot to bring them, didn’t I?’
‘Where are they?’
‘They’re safe.’
‘Where?’
‘Under my bed.’
‘Under your bed? Your bed’s not safe.’
‘Under my mattress. I’ll bring them in next week.’
‘What are you, short on cells?’ said Thomas. ‘I don’t want none of that at school. Bring ’em next time we’re at Angel Head.’
Somewhere high in the town a clock struck the quarter. You wouldn’t have heard it if it wasn’t for the wind. Thomas looked at his watch. It was 2.15 p.m. and approaching a special time …
It was at 2.20 p.m. that his grandfather was hit at Passchendaele all those years ago. He unscrewed the end of his device with a head full of memories of the Belgian front.
‘Flat,’ said Walter. ‘Flat, with trees here and there.’
And on that day, four miles away in a clump of them, boys not much older than Thomas primed the fuse of a twenty-eight-pound shell. In that war of course the munitions were much bigger than this. There were tanks and horses, Walter told him about the horses, sometimes as many as six, heaving in their traces, dragging eight-inch howitzers through the mud. English horses fighting German horses with no particular difference of opinion, but dying just the same.
Some of them were so terrified, their hard-ons were permanent …
‘What’s going on?’ said Maurice.
‘Just thinking.’
‘Well, come on, lose the cunt, I don’t like the look of it.’
A wave almost made the top of Thomas’s Wellingtons. He moved to the far side of the pool. With the wind tearing up his back, Maurice watched in apprehension as Thomas wired the device. A nasty moment was coming up from which the inventor wasn’t excluded, and it was the eternity it took to ease the wooden safety-pin out of the electrical detonator. The terminals were now connected, and the top screwed on again.
.–.. .. ...– .
‘Live,’ said Thomas.
‘Bung it then.’
Thomas felt the bravado of booze upon him. He was going to let this thing off on the dot of two-twenty, and he toyed with the pipe, smiling at Maurice, who wasn’t smiling at all.
‘Just thinking about the Germans,’ said Thomas.
‘What Germans?’
‘First World War Germans.’
‘You’re arse-holed,’ said Maurice. ‘Come on, you’re giving me the shits.’
Thomas returned eyes to his watch. About a minute to go.
At two-nineteen the German boys loaded the shell into a field gun made by Krupp. They slammed the breach and knelt with hands over their ears as the gunner turned away to fire it.
‘We don’t know what fear is,’ said Thomas.
‘Don’t we?’
‘Not really, not real fear.’
‘Speak for your fuckin’ self,’ said Maurice. ‘Come on, or I’ll run. Throw the fucker in.’
Thomas dropped the device into the pool.
Maurice was already running, crashing through the waves, and Thomas wasn’t far behind. He was counting seconds and both were laughing hysterically. Did his grandfather laugh that day? He said he laughed a lot in the war …
The shell came out of the barrel at one thousand six hundred feet every second. It landed in a meadow where there were already many dead. And when the fulminate of mercury collapsed into trinitrotoluene, there were suddenly many more …
There was an enormous explosion.
A bouquet of seaweed and young fish made twenty feet into the air, sliced off by the wind like a scythe and on into the green sea.
The boys stared in shock: never seen anything like this before. Simultaneously, an echo went up the coast, swallowing itself, and belching out, and swallowing to the steeple of Holy Trinity Church:
.– – – .. ... .. –
‘Christ Almighty.’
The explosion took the head off the horse in front, and behind the white horse was screaming blind, blood hosing out of its nostrils, its face like shattered crockery. A boy from Bow, East London, died instantly: a sergeant in the Scots Infantry died too. And Walter stood there looking at it all, horses dragging dying horses, and the sky full of burning earth. Even as the shrapnel went in he’d been hungry; the passage of metal through his stomach felt like nothing more than a sudden increase in appetite, not really pain, just sudden hunger accelerating into unconsciousness. And as he fell, in that same piece of a second, shrapnel from the same shell hit him in the head.
.. –– –.. . .– –..
I’m dead.
I’m dead.
And death was under an intensely black sky spangled with stars. He felt the night on his face and saw visions more vivid than dreams. His mother came to him in the darkness and kissed him and he wasn’t afraid. Sometimes he heard his mother singing, sometimes the sound of horses’ hooves on pavements, but far off and muffled, like they used to sound when he was a little boy and the streets were filled with snow. And then he was in brilliant sunlight, walking again across that same dusty square in the village east of Passchendaele. She was fifteen with corn-blonde hair that smelt of bacon and apples, and she was pretty as flowers. He knew he was in a dream, and the dream was her laughter in a plait of burning stars and a language he couldn’t understand. ‘Je t’aime.’ Before he left to go up the line he took her a bunch of Michaelmas daisies wrapped in newspaper. They made love at the edge of a wood in a drift of bluebells. It was the first love for both of them, and he knew she was the love of his life …
But he couldn’t remember her name. He couldn’t remember anything. Where had the war gone? The war had killed him and gone away …
On the second day the flies came to lay their eggs. He could hear them crawling over the horses. Their feet squabbled on his eyelids and walked on his teeth. He could hear them inside his helmet and was terrified they were inside his skull. A sound he was barely aware of wasn’t there any more. His watch had stopped. There were flies in place of time, and he lost count of the days. Within hours, it seemed, his uniform was full of small maggots. He could see them now, clustered into his abdomen, simmering like a pan of rice.
It had taken all day to lift his head. He was lying on a pillow of horse flesh and the back end of a dead horse was trapping his legs. Its head was to his right. He looked at it with a wave of revulsion. What was happening to the horse was happening to him. Its skull was a brothel of flies, moving in and out of an eye socket. How many days had this been? Had he known how long maggots take to mature he could have worked back to the day the flies arrived. But he hadn’t seen them grow, they just appeared suddenly, and a five-to-eight-day approximation was as close as he could get to the day that he was hit. Why hadn’t he died of bleeding, or even lack of food? He was too frightened to eat that morning, a biscuit and tea and that was all. He thought that some sort of cycle must have developed, that the maggots must be growing in a functioning part of his gut: as they ate him, he ate them, and he survived therefore by a process of digestion …
Birds eat maggots.
Rain came in the night, and in the terrible darkness, dreams. There were fires in his sleep; he heard men yelling and saw the dead come alive again. On the day he arrived in this forsaken land, he’d seen a wall of two hundred dead Scotsmen in kilts, and as he crawled past, a boy with red hair swung an arm out, and he watched as an avalanche of maggots dropped from his sleeve. Some of the bodies were so full of them you would think they were just rolling around in their sleep …
He awoke at dawn under a cerise sky closer to the Municipality of Hell than he’d ever been. He longed to die, and he longed for his mother, wanted her to come again and kiss him. Tears welled in his eyes, he wept like a child, his mind in convulsive tangles of Morse and barbed-wire. All day he walked the coast of sleep. In his dreams things that appeared to be part of him began to undulate and shift. But to wake or to dream was no longer his to discern, and he rambled in and out of consciousness, confused between delirium and the enterprise of the maggots. He thought he was a man rolling in his sleep. He thought it was maggots that had raised his head and given vision to his eyes. It was the maggots alive, not him. And from that day he believed his thoughts were nothing more than the activity of the maggots in his brain …
Miles above him he could hear bird song, skylarks, high over the fields. And he could hear her laughter, and he remembered now, her name was Adèle.
She was a girl without history, one of thousands that trekked the flatlands to the towns and villages, most from the farms, either running away or running towards something or other. Beggars begging from beggars. Children of the dead. None could speak English, some were younger than his sister, twelve, fourteen – hard to tell because hunger does strange things to faces. There was famine in Belgium, and quite a lot of the girls would fuck for food.
But not Adèle, she was one of the lucky ones. She lived in a lean-to room without windows and worked in the kitchens of Les Deux Gorey, a run-down hotel at the edge of town where farmers used to eat before the officers were billeted there. Probably she paid the patron a few francs to sleep in the shed where he would normally have kept his wine and vegetables. Apple-racks still lined the walls. There was a musty smell of cider. It was possible she and the old man with the moustache were related, an uncle perhaps, but nobody, least of all him, showed any signs of caring about that …
Walter had to wait a long time that day, saluting everything that came in and out. His heart was filled with misgivings, a great sense of foreboding, but he kept it to himself …
And then at last she was there.
Hand in hand they crossed a meadow and a little stream sparkling with sunlight. On a distant church a single bell was ringing; it was the last Sunday in the month. She wore a cotton blouse and a blue skirt with patches and her feet were bare. His heart was beating in a crisis of anticipation: he had never kissed her properly, just her hands or her hair. But he ached for her lips, yearned to make her understand how much he loved her, and today, on this last day he was ever to see her, he determined that he would.
There were dragonflies and shoots of new bramble and it was hot. The path meandered with the stream and then broke away for a stand of woods. At its turning, they climbed a ruined wall and stared across a hillside ravished with bluebells.
What was she thinking? Was she thinking like him? They sat in silence while he smoked a cigarette. He could hear her breathing, smell the apples in her hair. Now was the moment, he was absolutely going to kiss her now, and he turned his face to hers with dizzy eyes, but she put a grin in the way and was waggling her toes.
‘Tu transpires?’
‘What?’
‘Transpires?’
Lifting her skirt she wiped sweat from his cheek with the hem. He looked down at her legs, one knee raised slightly higher than the other. She had pale beautiful thighs, and when she dropped the skirt she left them exposed and hung backwards on her hands, her face angled to the sun as though her hair were too heavy for her head. Her blouse tightened to her breasts, she wore nothing more. At last her eyes rose and locked into his in a flood of blue adrenalin. Walter was intoxicated with love and desire. Her skirt was pulled so high, and her breasts so perfect, everything she was was an expression of exquisite sensuality. But why today was it that a girl so sweetly shy as Adèle didn’t seem to care?
He stubbed his cigarette, it fell into nettles, there was too much silence.
‘I’m going away tomorrow,’ he said.
She continued staring without moderation of her gaze, as if this were something she already understood. Slipping from the wall, she explored a pocket in her skirt, and extended her hand to give him something. He followed her down to take it. It was an American silver dollar, for good luck, she said, and he understood too.
‘Ça c’est pour toi pour toujours.’
How many more eternities could he squander? He put a hand into her hair and in an agony of longing, kissed her on the lips. So fleeting it was barely a touch, like a dragonfly on the water, and it was a lie. Adèle raised her head in innocent inquisition, as though the kiss had been a pleasure taken rather than given, and when she looked at him she looked deep past his eyes. There were three buttons on her blouse, two white, one yellow. She undid them carefully, pulled the blouse from her skirt, ‘Je t’aime, Walter,’ and encircling him in her arms, she pressed her slender body into his and made kisses into his mouth. Her hands spread over his back, as his now over hers, lifting the blouse in heavenly trespass from her waist to the nape of her neck. He could feel her heart beat, and she his, delighting in the timorous fingers roaming her body, albeit incompetent of his desire. Her hand went to his hand, a gentle guide, and now his hand was on her breast. Adèle kissed his lips, kissed his face, intense, careless kisses – her mouth seemed untaught to satisfy. At last he abandoned the embrace, took his hands to her hair, her eyes, her neck, a sublime distraction, and all to rehearse the ecstasy of finding her breasts again.
When their kissing ceased of its own excess; they stood breathless, holding each other with eyes closed. Today was theirs for ever, and if it should never come again, it would always be theirs. They could hear crickets in the pasture and cuckoos in the wood, and beyond, almost as an illusion, the resonance of endless war. A new bombardment had begun. It seemed meaningless in the paradise of this moment, but both were listening now, to the big guns, rumbling fifty miles away …
Darkness swallowed everything; there were voices in the fields. He could see electric-lanterns and hear voices. Something put intense pressure on his face. He tried to fight, but hadn’t the strength to lift an arm. He was breathing black air, suffocating gas. He knew the Germans had come again, to kill him again, and reclaim this promontory of land he’d already died for. But he cared nothing for that. He was with his love, and thought only of her …