‘Furlough, Willie, I’m letting you go home on a bit of furlough, you lucky fucker.’
Willie knew he wasn’t due leave. Or had it been eighteen months again already? Had it been a thousand years? Despite the mud in his very arteries, despite the cold stone that had replaced his head, a tiny bubble of remnant joy surged up. He was going home, just for a bit. Father Buckley was still looking out for them from the grave, wherever his grave might be.
‘Thank you, Sarge,’ he said. ‘I could kiss you, Sarge.’
‘Go way, you fucker, you,’ said Christy Moran. ‘I’m not your mother.’
‘You bugger,’ said Pete O‘Hara. ’Don’t leave us here on our own.‘
‘Sorry, Pete,’ said Willie Dunne.
‘Bring us back a parrot then,’ said Joe Kielty.
‘Rightyo.’
When Willie was all packed up and his kit aloft his back and his gun in hand, and his greatcoat over everything else, and he wasn’t in a position to stop him, Christy Moran reached in under the coat and put something in his top left-hand tunic pocket.
‘Now,’ he said. ‘You keep that. Just in case I don’t see you again.’
‘What is it, Sarge?’
‘It’s that fucking medal they gave me. I didn’t know where to put it till this moment.’
‘But, Sarge, it’s your medal, for gallantry, Sarge, killing those Germans and all.’
‘I don’t fucking want it. You earned it just as much, you stupid cunt. Anyhow, Willie, it has a little harp on it and a little crown, and I reckon between the two it might get you home safe.’
‘Jesus, Sarge, I don’t know what to say.’
‘Then shut up, Willie, and get going.’
‘Rightyo.’
Chapter Nineteen
What a thing it was to be released out of there and ferried along by truck and train to places on the earth that were still firm underfoot. He stared out at that world, thinking all the time of his companions behind in that desolation. He found himself wondering what they would be gassing on about, and was surprised that though they were planted in a spot so evil, he missed them.
He was shocked to discover that England, as he passed through, looked and smelled the same. An Irishman passes through England and cannot think English thoughts. What lies between his home and Belgium? That England.
When he came into the lower hallway of the chief superintendent’s quarters he saw Dolly straight away in a corner there, playing with a line of floppy dolls. He knew that his mother’s mother made such dolls; he recognized them suddenly from his own childhood, green, white and blue woollen dolls, with painted cloth faces. He had forgotten such matters entirely.
‘Hello,’ he said, ‘hello!’
The little girl turned her head. ‘Who are you?’ she said.
‘It’s Willie,’ he said, ‘Willie, don’t you know me?’
The little girl jumped up to her feet and raced across the cold flagstones to him. She creased herself like a wonderfully folding parcel into his arms, so that suddenly she was chest to chest with him, her heart beating, his heart beating. He was so glad they had been detrained in Amiens along the way and deloused and their uniforms given a good army clean for themselves. He had stood in a long line of civilian showers, the steam battering out of the cubicles, and those battle-altered men singing and shouting in the flameless inferno. What simple joy to be clean. What joy to have this little angel folded in against his cleaned breast.
‘Oh, Willie, you look as old as Papa now!’ she said brightly.
‘You’ve grown up too, Dolly,’ he said. ‘What age are you now?’
‘I’m nine nearly. Did you get my letter, Willie? I was hours and hours writing it.’
‘And a great long letter it was, Dolly, and you have no idea how glad I was to get it.’
‘I am sure you would rather have had biscuits, Willie,’ she said.
‘I would rather have had your letter than any biscuits, Dolly,’ he said. ‘Are Maud and Annie above?’
‘They are, they are, Willie. And not expecting to see you, Willie!’
‘Willie, Willie,’ cried Annie and Maud, and it was true they were just like little girls with him too. Maybe they couldn’t help it. Old times flooded back. They kissed him in turn and Annie roughly grabbed him for a few moments and looked sternly into his face. But she didn’t say a word. She was crying though, her nice brown eyes brimming with tears and the tears darting down her cheeks. But she didn’t try to wipe them away. She looked at him fiercely, and very slightly shook him, gripping the worn flannel of his sleeve.
He looked about the old sitting-room and there wasn’t a mousehole out of place. If he had been lying asleep in some pitiful daylight in the line, and dreaming, it could not have seemed to him more real or more haunted, all in the same breath. He tried to imagine them here these last years, and he seemed in his mind’s eye to see them flitting in and out of the rooms, as if his three sisters were a great crowd of women. It was a puzzling thought, and he put a hand to his head.
‘Are you all right, Willie?’ said Maud. ‘Sit you down there, man dear, and we’ll make you a cup of tea.’
‘That will be lovely, Maud,’ he said, and started to cry himself. But they weren’t tears of sorrow. They were other tears he didn’t know the category of.
‘How has it been out there?’ said Maud, Annie still staring at him all the while. What age would Annie be now? Maybe fifteen. And Maud, surely seventeen by now. Did she have a boy to walk out with? Somehow he didn’t think she did. And somehow he didn’t think he should ask.
‘ Ah, it’s just a war,‘ he said. ’You know.‘
‘Well, we don’t know, Willie, because we’ve never been!’ said Dolly.
And that’s well and good,‘ said Willie Dunne.
‘We’ve had wars here too since you left last time,’ said Annie. ‘With scoundrels in the street and Papa distraught at every turn. And they say that there are men coming home from the war now, Willie, and giving their guns to those filthy insurgents, and saying that they lost them.’
‘I never heard of that, Annie,’ said Willie: ‘As you can see, I have mine safe and sound.’
‘I’m glad you do, Willie,’ said Annie.
‘Oh, Annie, give over your old talk,’ said Maud, ‘and put that shepherd’s pie back in the stove, and Willie, won’t Papa be home now in a twinkle, and won’t he be surprised.’
When Annie stumped out to the scullery, Willie crept a little closer to Maud.
‘I got your letter, Maud,’ said Willie.
‘Oh, that’s all history now,’ said Maud, but he knew from how she said it that it wasn’t quite so.
‘I’m glad,’ he said, anyhow.
The policeman was heard coming up the wooden stairs in his boots. He pushed open the door, Dolly heading for him like a swallow to its nest.
‘Ah, Dolly, Dolly,’ he said. ‘Whatever would I do without you?’
He took off his cap and laid it on a bockety little table like a thousand times before. The circles and rounds of a life. He seemed lost and deep in his own thoughts. His face looked older, much more grey on his moustache, the cheeks lined and thin-looking. It was only a September evening and no one would stir a while yet to light a lamp, but nevertheless there was only a twilight in the room and streaks of grey Dublin light lying through it.
Then he looked across and saw Willie standing there, smiling as best he could. Willie didn’t know what to expect, nor indeed what he had done exactly to bring Maud’s letter to him in the trench. He had a fair idea but he didn’t know exactly. But simple feeling rode over such thoughts and he couldn’t help but smile to see his father’s face.
His father said not a word. He finished putting his cap in its place and, holding Dolly by the hand, he moved across the gloomy space. He walked right up to Willie’s chest, and of course he was a good foot taller than his son. The khaki uniform seemed stark alongside the trimness of the chief superintendent’s black cloth and silver
braid. The cuffs especially were elaborately decorated. Willie had never really noticed that before. He felt like water was pouring into him through a sewer-hole on the top of his head. He was being weighed down by it, whatever was the cause. He thought suddenly of his litany of vanished friends, and vanished faces that had not been friends but had vanished anyway. He thought of all those men of the 16th destroyed, hundreds upon hundreds. He knew he was beyond censure in his love and regard for them, although it had been difficult to honour them properly in their passing. It wasn’t like the circles and rounds of life, it wasn’t as if there had been time for proper eulogy and farewell, plumes of black feathers on funeral horses, cold gatherings in Mount Jerome or Glasnevin. He was a man of five foot six who had seen a thousand deaths. Now he stood an inch from the source of childhood comfort, the man indeed who had washed him tenderly like a child when last he’d been home on furlough. Well he remembered it, the big hands cleaning away the war. That could never be effected again, he knew.
His father let Dolly’s hand go. He stopped a moment and maybe didn’t know what to do. Then he lifted his right hand and shook Willie’s right hand, leaning forward and lifting it from Willie’s side and shaking it.
‘There you are, Willie,’ he said. But the voice was hard and cold.
‘Hello, Papa,’ said Willie.
Then the policeman did what to Willie was a horrible thing. He laughed as if there were something that he didn’t believe, though Willie had said nothing. Maud was just coming in with the shepherd’s pie on an old Wicklow dish, and she heard that laugh too, and looked at her father with a sort of cloudy fear swirling around her head.
‘Have I done something to offend you, P -?’ Willie couldn’t even finish the word before the policeman spoke.
‘They shot one of my recruits,’ said his father, in a surprisingly vague tone, ‘and brought havoc and ruckus to the city in the name of - who, Willie? Germany, they say. Through all these precious and important streets they put death and disorder. They put a mark on Dublin that can never be wiped away, a great, spreading stain of blood, Willie. And I read in a letter from my own son that he feels for them some stupid, ruinous feeling, that he has seen some bloody-handed gossoon killed in a doorway and wondered that he looked no older than himself. You stand here, Willie, in the uniform of your gracious king. Under solemn oath to defend him and his three kingdoms. You stand here in your own childhood home, your father a man that has strove to keep order in this great city and protect it from miscreants and the evil of traitors and rebels, for love of you all and in memory of your mother.’
Oh, it was darker now in the room. There was a poison slipping easily through Willie’s veins. The poison of disappointment and new horror. Never in all his days had he seen his father so chill and strange, the deep voice corrupted by anger, sounding like the terrifying voice of a stranger, of another. Never in his life had he even heard any such speech from his father, using words out of parades and ceremonies. Of course, Dolly did not notice, but ran over to Maud and leaped up onto her chair at the table.
‘Sit down here beside me, Willie. I’ve been keeping your chair here all this time.’
‘It’s a funny, dark world out at the war, Papa,’ said Willie slowly. ‘It brings your mind to think a thousand thoughts, a thousand new thoughts.’
‘I won’t stand here and listen to your villainy!’ shouted his father. ‘I have enough of villains and rogues out there in those streets. It is all under my care!’
‘I know that, Papa. And that is a great thing.’
‘Oh, you say so, my little son? You say that. Of course, you don’t mean it. Of course, you think everything I am and all I’ve done is a heap of ould nothing. A big heaped-up mound of scraps and peelings! That the hens can peck over! Isn’t that it, Willie? With that treacherous gob on you! Now, that they might have killed me at the gates of St Stephen’s Green, that that demon woman Markievicz might have marched up and shot her bullet into my breast and taken this life out of me, before I had to open a bitter letter and read those bitter words and feel the bitter bile loosen in the very centre of my body, so that I was crying in the darkness, crying in the darkness, for a fool and a forsaken father!’
Maud was openly crying, crying hot, plentiful tears, still holding the shepherd’s pie. The heat of the dish had leaked out through her cloth and it was starting to burn her hands, but she didn’t let it down.
‘Will you not sit here, Willie?’ said Dolly.
But Willie could think of no other thing than to look about him quickly one last time and, nodding his head to his father, and nodding his head to his sisters, go back down the worn stairs and out into the gathering dark.
That was the first thing on his list of important matters, that he had gone over again and again in his head on truck and train, wondering how things might be - and the second thing was Gretta.
He knew that dozens of letters from home went astray despite the best efforts of the postal service. He knew that many letters arrived half miraculously, and many arrived late. He told himself this religiously now, his father’s words pounding in his head like the percussion of a great cannonade.
He went through the streets of his own city, up towards Christ Church. He didn’t just have a general notion about the place; he realized he knew it in places stone by stone. As an apprentice builder he couldn’t help but, in his heyday as a young man, gawp up amazed at the flying buttresses of the old, grey Protestant cathedral, and see where bits of it leaped the road itself. He used to think of the web of strong scaffolding required and the work of even erecting that, those vanished teams of fetchers and masons, mortar-batterers and the like. Stone upon stone, as with any building, the lowest to the highest. Stone upon stone, sitting on their beds, and snug and never a rocking motion. And he thought as he walked for the hundredth time in his head how like dancers the builders were, when things were going well and there was a lovely polish to their movements and a flowing stream of work. Well, they must all have been in high good form when they threw up that old cathedral, anyhow. The Protestants had two great cathedrals and the Catholics had nary a one, but he couldn’t remember why that was, if he ever knew.
He didn’t feel suddenly just as bad as he had done to hear his father speaking to him so, because he was approaching Gretta. How could he feel entirely wretched when he was coming near to where she was? Oh, the flood of battle and the tides of grief flowed through him and in him - but just as he traipsed along there under the cathedral railings, and turned down towards her doorway, he couldn’t help but feel rinsed as a dusty tree in rain, he couldn’t help it. When he thought of Gretta in that moment he thought all things could be put aside, put away. He would see the war out and when it was over he and Gretta would - by heavens, he would ask her now, he had been very stupid and tardy, he would ask her now again if she would consent to being his own true one. He was a grown man now, a grown man, and she would see him for what he was, and not mind it to the degree that she would refuse him. For that never would be so.
He moved up her ruined stairs. It was horribly dark because the house was squeezed in against Christ Church, and the windows on each landing looked like those dim paintings in old churches, lurking in the holy, lightless air. It might be Daniel in the lions’ den, or the grave of Judas in the Potter’s Field, you wouldn’t know. He supposed you would need an old candle or something of the sort to have a proper look at things.
The door was always open into the great, fallen room of the long-dead bishops. The rags hung down from the dark ceiling just as always, with its myriad silent instruments in plaster. The families behind the partitions were murmuring and laughing; the glow of candles showed up the pitiful state of the ‘curtains’.
And there was Gretta in her own strange light. Why, of course, Gretta herself was a candle, Gretta herself was a light. Gretta with her fine, white face as lovely as any stage singer’s.
She was feeding a baby at her breast. He didn’t see that immediately, but now
that he stopped at the margin of her world, he saw the tiny child, he could even see the full, tight breast where it covered the child’s face. Little hands opened and closed, opened and closed, and Willie could sense in the creature a depth of pleasure. He had lain down with Gretta but oh, so many months before. He was not so much a fool of a soldier that he couldn’t count months.
‘Gretta, Gretta,’ he whispered to alert her, as if she were in danger of a kind, and he must not wake or stir her enemies.
‘Willie Dunne,’ she said, and wafted a thin blanket over her breast and the child’s head.
‘Is the child your own?’ he said, perhaps desperately, because he knew she would not have milk otherwise. She was no wet-nurse, as far as he knew. Unless she had carried a child for him and lost it? Could such awful tragedy have occurred? Is that why she had not written? He would make it up to her a thousand times. Oh, Gretta, my Gretta.
‘Well, it is my child, and my husband’s child, Willie. You won’t make a fuss now? I did write to you, Willie, and you never replied. And things go on as things go on, as my father will say.’
‘You wrote to me to say you wanted to be married?’
‘I wrote to you, Willie, to say I had got that letter from your friend, and how was it so, and all the rest.’
‘What letter from what friend?’ said Willie, feeling as she spoke as if he might have to go back out onto the landing and spew, she’d caught him so sudden. There was fear in his words now, fear worse than the fear of mere warring.
‘I have it over in the drawer. Go and fetch it if you want, Willie. But you will know what it says. And you did not answer my letter. And I knew then you had done what it said. And Willie, whatever I am and whatever we were, I could not feel just the same after that.’
After what?‘ said Willie.
‘Do you want me to say such things? Go and read it for yourself.’
So Willie crossed over to the cheap little stand of drawers.