‘It’s all right.’
‘Tell me what’s up.’
But he had told him too much already. Barton would have enough of his own to cope with as soon as they left here. He must manage by himself over this, as he had managed in the past.
‘Wouldn’t it be a good thing for you to talk about it?’
It was not simply what Barton said but his tone of voice, the chance it offered. With shock Hilliard realized that he wanted to cry out, as the Field-Gunner had cried, to go across the room to Barton, who would listen, would know, as Beth had known on the nights he had crept into her room and slept in the safe darkness beneath her bed.
The surface of his skin went hot as he took in what he had been thinking. Barton had released some anxiety which had been coiled up within him, and there he was now, on the other side of the apple loft, this new person, a stranger, entirely familiar, just as he had been when sitting in the orchard and at the officers’ dining table. He was … What?
Behind him. Barton got out of bed. He went over to one of his cases, opened it and took something out, came back and removed the tumbler from Hilliard’s hand. ‘Not too much,’ he said. ‘but it’s what you need, I think.’ His father might have spoken like that to a patient.
‘Go on.’
Hilliard lifted the tumbler. The brandy was slightly diluted by the water which had been left there and it tasted warm and comforting as some medicine of childhood. He drank it slowly. He remembered the change that came over the men’s faces in the cold early mornings as they drank their rum issue, and the colour came seeping back into the night-time greyness and tiredness of the flesh.
‘We’d better get some sleep now. They seem to wake up pretty damned early here.’
‘When we …’ But Hilliard did not go on, he was overcome with such tiredness that he wondered if he could reach his camp bed. He had been going to say, ‘When we get back to the line.’ The mornings would be even earlier then and the sleep they had had at night even less. But he would not speak about it after all, there was no point.
His last thought after the lamp had gone out was that he did not want Barton to go up to the front line, he wanted to have him stay behind here, put into some administrative job, anything. For he should not be there among the roaring, blasting guns, in such appalling danger, risking his life in the small daily accidents. He thought, we need him, we need what he has to give us. I need him.
For the second night he slept without dreaming.
‘Any time now.’
‘Day after tomorrow.’
‘End of this week.’
‘Well, it can’t last, can it?’
Every day Hilliard heard one man or another prophesying the Battalion’s return to the front line. But no order came through, they stayed on at Percelle and after a time, in the September days, that seemed almost as hot as those of June and July, a vague air of restlessness hung about the camp. The men were on edge, wanting to know something for certain. Nothing was said.
The days were taken up with a succession of drills and parades and inspections, lectures, exercises, demonstrations, physical training, bayonet and trench mortar practices. Many of them were resented simply because of their uselessness. Nothing, Hilliard thought, had ever really been taught him which was a true preparation for the everyday physical life of the trenches, no battle went in practice as it went on paper, and so there was no chance to utilize this or that theory. So much of what they had to do here, shocked as they still were, was fatiguing and pointless.
At night the men sat about smoking, playing cards, writing letters in copy-pencil and going over and over again all their stories of that summer, as if they could not help probing a sore. The new recruits listened, their expressions faintly incredulous, as though they were hearing the adventures of old men, for it was so easy here, among the drooping orchards in the sun, it was all an exercise, tedious but unreal, they could not fully imagine what the others talked about.
But, gradually, the faces of those who had been in France through the summer looked less tired and drained, even than when Hilliard had returned, rest and release from immediate fear, and the leave some of them had had, were like moisture, pulping out dehydrated flesh. They were all sunburned.
Only the C.O. was the same, looked haunted, his eyes and hands continually restless. He sent for Hilliard and talked to him, kept Barton telling one story after another over the dinner table, like a child spinning out the time before having to go to bed.
The early mornings were beautiful, when the orchard trees and beyond them those of the copse and the poplars lining the canal loomed as milky shadows out of a thick mist, until the sun struck down, catching the dew on cobwebs, the air cleared. All around Percelle the life of some of the farmers continued, the soldiers met them coming down the lane from the fields, wearing old corduroy trousers and huge shoes. That spring they had almost all been driven away, Percelle had been in a belt of land that had come under a short spell of heavy cross-fire. But the war had moved on far enough for some return to be made to everyday life, though not to normality, for the army and the shattered houses were still there. It was the older people who came back and carried on.
Five miles southwards, the small town of Crevify had escaped much damage, the café tables still stood out on the pavements in the market square, covered in stiff cloths, coffee was served with hot croissants and meringues and éclairs, and in the evenings, bad beer and wine but good brandy. Hilliard and Barton walked there through the fields and, once, the town band came out and played – selections from musical comedies of the nineties, Russian waltzes and French marches, with the late evening sun glittering on their instruments and ruddying the puffed-out faces of the players. Barton sat back, his legs up on another cane chair, smiling with pleasure at the incongruity of it. He said, as Hilliard had said that first evening to Coulter, ‘Where’s the war?’ But the streets of the town were full of their own Battalion, and the only Frenchmen in Crevify were old.
That was the evening when Captain Franklin had gone walking past alone, and Barton had called out to him cheerfully, ‘Come and have a drink, sir. Listen to the band!’
For although there was something about the Adjutant which Hilliard did not like, Barton would never agree with him. ‘He’s all right,’ he said, as he said about everyone.
Franklin had stopped and looked across at them, the same lack of expression on his long face. His skin was not tanned but reddened by the sun.
‘The beer’s rotten but the chairs are comfortable.’
Hilliard had not thought that anyone in the world could have resisted Barton’s friendliness, the knack he had of attracting all available company. Franklin did not move, but there had been something like disapproval on his face, though in fact he had not looked at Barton but at Hilliard when he spoke. ‘I won’t if you don’t mind. I’m on my way back.’ And walked on slowly. But when Hilliard swore, Barton had only said, ‘Oh, he’s all right!’ as always and then forgot it, calling for more drinks.
It was here at the café table that he wrote so many of his letters. Because, for every one Hilliard sent, his friend wrote four or five, long letters in quick, black handwriting, sprinkled with exclamation marks and, when he was writing to his sisters, with small drawings and doodles in the margins, for their children.
‘What do you find to say?’ Hilliard had once asked, watching the flow of Barton’s hand on and on, page after page. He had looked up, puzzled.
‘Oh, there’s no shortage of material, surely?’
‘Isn’t there?’
‘I tell them what we do all day, I describe this place, what I can see, who goes by, what the band’s playing, and then there are all the questions to answer and ask – oh, we have jokes and so forth.’
‘Jokes?’
‘Family jokes – you know the kind of thing.’
Hilliard did not. His own letters to his family – and he wrote to them collectively, now that he had nothing private left to say to Beth
– were dull, full of polite thanks for parcels and always, when he read them over, very much the same. He never referred to Barton.
‘When the war’s over or we manage to hit leave at the same time you can come and meet them all,’ Barton had said. ‘Then you’ll know who I’m talking about and writing to, you’ll get them sorted out.’
Though Hilliard had imagined them endlessly, these people who shared so much with Barton, he had looked at their faces, staring out at him from the photographs, and put names to them and remembered their individual characteristics, as Barton had described them, he built up the family piece by piece within his own mind. It pleased him.
He said, ‘I wouldn’t much like you to meet my family.’
‘Oh, I think we’d probably get on rather well.’
‘No.’
‘Why? I get along with most people.’
Yes, that was true, and he saw at once that Barton would charm his mother and tease Beth, would listen to his father without impatience, would take trouble over the Major, and that they would all like him. But he wanted to keep Barton to himself.
Then, Barton’s mother had sent him a message. It came at the end of one of her long letters. ‘And all kind thoughts to your nice friend John Hilliard.’
Barton had read it out mockingly. ‘You’re my “nice friend” – there now!’
Hilliard felt both acute pleasure and, again, a curious unease. He was afraid, too, of being known and referred to by this person he had never seen, by Barton’s mother, whose name was Miriam and wore her hair in a soft, loose bun at the nape of her neck, whose features were both plain and pretty and also strangely old-fashioned. Hilliard could not imagine his own mother sending any messages to a young man she had never met, even making allowances for the informalities of wartime. He had only managed to say, ‘Oh – well, thank her very much.’
‘Right.’
And he had watched Barton’s hand move smoothly across the paper, seen the words form upside down. ‘Hilliard says, “thank you very much”!!!’
The message back in the next letter had been, ‘John Hilliard is clearly a man of few words.’
‘So you’ll have to do better next time,’ Barton had said.
He gave Hilliard most of his letters to read, sharing them with as little concern as Hilliard shared the Fortnum and Mason’s groceries in his parcels.
After that, a dialogue was established between him and the Barton family, mother and father, brothers and sisters, short messages were passed, jokes made and he was at first uncertain how to manage it all, for he had never experienced such people. But when he said as much, Barton looked amused and only said, ‘Well, you have now!’ Hilliard knew that he did not completely understand, for to him his own family were the norm, were altogether known and presented no problems. Besides, people never did present problems to him, he got along, as he said, with everyone.
‘I hope we keep Mr Barton with us, sir,’ Coulter said, coming up into the apple loft one afternoon when Hilliard was changing into his riding boots. ‘He’s done the world of good to this company, anyone can see that. He’s done the C.O. good as well, sir.’
‘You’re right, yes.’
‘You know what happens though, sir – we always lose our best officers.’ Then, turning and catching sight of Hilliard’s expression, he added, ‘No, sir, what I mean is, they ship them off to another Battalion or put them up at Brigade H.Q. just when we need them. You know that, sir – how they mess us about, and it’s never the ones we could do without, is it?’
‘Well, let’s hope it doesn’t happen.’
‘Yes, sir. By the way, sir, I don’t know if anything’s up but I hear the Brigadier’s coming down tomorrow.’
‘Probably just routine.’
‘Checking up on us, yes, sir.’
‘I suppose we’d better get some rifle cleaning done though – give him something to approve of!’
‘If you ask me, sir, the men are all a bit sick of rifle cleaning and such, they’ve cleaned them till they’re about worn away, this past week or so.’
‘I know. But do you think they’d rather be on the move?’
But the Brigadier’s visit passed off quickly and without event, the men waited all the rest of that day and on into the evening, for some order. None came. It was only Hilliard who was sent for by Garrett – Garrett, who looked more than ever anxious, as though this long rest period were getting on his nerves, too, he would rather move back up and have it over with.
He said, ‘Captain Franklin thinks one of B Company might go off on a gas course. He thinks it would be useful. I’ve told him I didn’t want to spare you, Hilliard. If we get our marching orders this week I want you with your platoon. There are few enough experienced officers left in this Battalion, God knows. But Franklin’s got some bee in his bonnet about it. I said I’d have a word with you. Perhaps we’d better send Barton? That’s what Franklin had in mind.’
‘How long would it last?’
‘A week plus a couple of days’ travelling.’
‘Are you asking for my opinion, sir?’
‘I suppose so.’ Garrett shifted the papers about on his desk. ‘Yes. Opinion. Advice. I don’t know.’
‘We’re not likely to stay here much longer, are we? We can’t possibly.’
Garrett was silent.
‘Well – you probably don’t know anything about it, but that much does seem obvious. We don’t get an indefinite rest period and we’ve overstayed this one, surely? So the chances are that we’ll be going somewhere or other within a day or two. And – I would rather Barton stayed and went with us. I think …’ He paused. Garrett was staring down at the table, perhaps not even listening.
‘I think we heed him.’
‘Yes.’ A bluebottle droned on and on against the window pane, behind the desk. For a long time, Garrett sat, mesmerised. Hilliard noticed the faint, brown discolorations on the backs of his hands, like the mottling on the skin of a much older man. Garrett was not fifty. ‘Yes, I know.’ He looked up and into Hilliard’s face. ‘Only Franklin seems to …’
What? Garrett did not finish. Then, Hilliard knew for certain that the Adjutant disliked both Barton and himself, distrusted them, perhaps, and had done so for no good reason, from the beginning, from the first night at the dining table when he had not smiled at Barton’s stories about his horse-riding Aunt Eustacia.
‘Well – I’ll think about it. I can’t decide just now. I thought I’d find out how you saw it, that was all.’
Hilliard went out of the room and through the low doorway into the yard. The farm dog came bounding across from between the trees, nuzzling at his legs, as he nuzzled those of anyone who stopped for a moment in his vicinity. Hilliard roughed the hair of its head automatically. Franklin wanted Barton to go. Perhaps the gas course was only the first move in some plan to get him permanently transferred. Well, had he himself not wished, every day now, that Barton should not have to go up to the front line?
The sun dipped down between the trees of the copse and for a second or two flamed straight into his face.
He did not want Barton to go away.
‘Franklin won’t be pleased.’
‘What the hell?’ Barton lay on his bed reading a letter. The C.O. had sent someone else on the gas course.
‘Only that it’s better to get on with your senior officers if at all possible. It makes life easier.’
‘Life seems perfectly all right to me.’
For the first time, Hilliard lost his temper. ‘Don’t be so bloody complacent. You haven’t been anywhere yet, you haven’t seen anything. You’re in a rest camp, remember? You don’t know what you’re talking about but you damn soon will.’
‘I know,’ Barton said quietly.
Hilliard was silent.
‘Look, I don’t really care for Franklin much more than you do, John, but it’s a perfectly irrational dislike. He’s done nothing to me at all – or to you, for that matter. It’s a pure case of Dr Fe
ll.’
‘Oh, no. He’s got it in for us.’
‘Why?’
‘I’ve no idea.’
‘If it boils down to it, he doesn’t seem to like anyone much, does he?’ Barton sat up and swung his legs over the side of the bed. ‘He doesn’t have any particular friends, doesn’t do much in the way of relaxation except play bridge, and even then, it’s for the sake of the game, not the company.’
‘He doesn’t like to see other people being friendly.’
‘Nonsense. He could perfectly well have friends himself if he chose. He wouldn’t have to put himself out a great deal, but he doesn’t choose.’
‘Why?’
‘Lord, Hilliard, I don’t know.’
‘A Captain is easily capable of making one’s life a misery at the front, if he has half a mind.’
‘I should have thought that went for a C.O. or a Brigadier or for that matter for one’s own batman.’
‘All the same …’
‘Oh forget it, forget it.’ Barton laid a hand on his shoulder, laughing. ‘I didn’t go on the gas course, about which I’m fairly relieved. I didn’t enjoy all that plunging in and out of smoke-filled chambers at the training camp. I never could bear masks over my face. Franklin didn’t get his way. Now, let’s make the most of this place, while we can.’
Footsteps came quickly up the ladder. Whenever Coulter appeared, Hilliard could imagine him in the circus ring, he half-expected him to take a leap off the floor of the loft on to some trapeze dangling from a beam. He had given them an off-the-cuff juggling display one afternoon in the mess kitchen, throwing spinning saucers up into the air, and balancing glasses of water on his nose; ‘What are you doing in the army, Coulter? You should have stayed on at home and kept their spirits up!’
Coulter brought the crockery down neatly, piece by piece, turned and began to stack it away. ‘I’m right out of practice, sir, if you did but know it. Besides, I joined up to come to France, didn’t I, this is where the war is. I’m more use here than in a circus ring just at present.’ For Coulter was aggressive about the war, still patriotic and still confident, in spite of all he had seen. He had a distant respect for the Generals, close admiration for the officers of his own regiment. It was only politicians about whom he might occasionally say a bad word. But Hilliard liked Coulter, he had come to rely on him, though their relationship was entirely different from the one he had had with his former batman, the morose Bates. Coulter was more easygoing, he had greater nerve, and probably less stamina. But no, you couldn’t say that, for it was impossible to tell until you were in the line, you couldn’t pass any kind of true judgement upon a man, here, in the uneasy calm and quiet of the rest camp.