The door was heavy and my vision was starting to break up into patches of blackness. There was sweat on my face. I tugged the door but it wouldn’t open. I pulled again as hard as I could, hurting myself.
It gave way and I was in the corridor. The noise of the train was fierce out here. Every vent rattled but there was more air. Two men crouched on their haunches, playing cards, and they looked up at me as I pushed past them. I had to step high, between them, and I held my skirt close so that they could not see my legs.
There was a draught. I got as close to the window as I could and pressed my forehead to the glass. I breathed deeply and the clean air pushed down the nausea that was trying to swamp me. I was getting the better of it –
‘Here,’ said a woman’s voice. ‘Have some of this.’
It was the silver cap of a flask. The smell of brandy made me gag and I pushed it away.
‘No. Drink it. You’ll feel better immediately.’
Her voice made me follow the instruction. I lifted the silver cap and drank, and as the brandy went down my gullet, my nausea dissolved into fire.
‘That’s not enough. Drink more.’
I drank more. I drank off the capful and she refilled it. I drank that, too.
‘You haven’t eaten,’ she said.
‘No –’ It was true. The ham and cheese sandwiches at the buffet had looked stale.
‘I have some biscuits. They’re very good. They’re oat biscuits.’
I thought her eyes were black. They were hard to read, but her face was concerned, and I thought it seemed kind. Rain had begun and it made runnels which joined and parted on the black windows. We seemed to be going faster now, banging and rattling into the night.
‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘I feel much better.’
‘You should be careful, in your condition,’ she said. ‘Are you travelling alone?’
‘Yes.’
‘And you’re going all the way to Paris. You won’t be there until morning.’
‘I know that.’
‘It’s a very slow train. No matter. As long as you have someone to talk to, it’s tolerable. And something to eat and drink.’
‘Are you going as far as Paris yourself?’
‘Beyond Paris. Towards Béthune, do you know it?’
‘No, not at all.’
‘You’re a southerner, of course. But from where?’
‘From Aix,’ I said. ‘Aix-en-Provence.’
‘Ah, yes. I know it well.’
Better than I do, in that case, I thought, and nearly smiled. She caught it.
‘What makes you smile?’
‘Nothing.’
‘That’s nice. It’s only the young who smile for no reason,’ she added. ‘Once you grow older, once you have cares of your own –’ and her glance slid down over my waist. ‘They don’t last long, those carefree years.’
‘No.’ The brandy was working in me. I felt bold and indifferent. As long as the journey lasted, I had nothing to fear. I was a passenger like everyone else, with a ticket I’d paid for in my bag. No one knew who I was or where I came from, and they certainly didn’t know where I was going. In the racket of the train we were all equal. Even the smell of drink and the quarrel of the card-players didn’t bother me any more. I was equal to them, too. Until the train stopped it wouldn’t matter who had a home to go to, and who had none.
‘But there’s something in your voice that isn’t at all southern,’ she said.
‘My mother is English. We always spoke English together,’ I said. Maybe her quickness had startled it out of me.
‘English? Really?’ The strength of her interest surprised me. ‘And so you speak English perfectly?’
‘I suppose so. If my mother speaks English perfectly, then so do I.’
‘Say something to me,’ she demanded suddenly. I laughed. ‘Speak to me in English,’ she insisted.
‘Do you understand it yourself?’
She shrugged. ‘A few words here and there.’
‘It is a truth universally acknowledged,’ I began rapidly in English, ‘that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.’
‘Ah, that’s very good!’ she exclaimed, as if enchanted with me. ‘One would think it was your mother tongue.’
She had not believed a word I had told her. I put this aside to think about later.
‘And you can speak to anybody, just like that, in English? You can understand everything they say?’
‘Yes.’
‘It’s remarkable,’ she breathed. Then she gathered herself and spoke more blandly. ‘You are going to stay with relations,’ she stated.
‘No.’
Why not tell the truth? We were on a train. She would only remember a pale young woman from Aix-en-Provence, who spoke English. I could say what I liked.
‘You are going to join your husband,’ she guessed again.
‘No. I have no husband.’
‘Ah.’
‘I’m a widow,’ I said, a little too late, and a little too brazenly. But I didn’t care. ‘My husband died in the war.’
‘Ah,’ she repeated. ‘Well, there are many like that. You are certainly not alone.’
‘On the contrary, I am completely alone,’ I said. The train swayed and I caught hold of the window strap to steady myself.
‘It only seems so,’ said the woman, surprising me.
‘What do you mean?’
‘You are talking to me. You are not alone.’
I shrugged. ‘Well, of course, if you want to be literal –’
‘You’re talking to me. I am interested in you. Who knows where that might lead?’
‘It’ll lead to Paris, and then you’ll get off the train and go in your direction and I’ll get off and go in mine.’
‘Not necessarily. Listen. The train’s slowing down. When we come into the station, allow me to take you to my compartment. There will be no difficulty about the ticket. It’s not reasonable for you to be travelling in third-class, in your condition.’
It was her look that captured me. Intent, grave, almost motherly. She put her gloved hand on my arm and said again, ‘It really isn’t reasonable. You’ll be much better off with me. Just as far as Paris, if you prefer.’
No. It was like that, but not like that. I must tell the truth. It was my own weakness that captured me. I was hungry, and tired, and afraid. She offered shelter, and the chance that when the train stopped I would know where I was going. I had brandy boldness then, but no real courage. It wasn’t until Claire was born that I began to have real courage.
‘On s’occupera de vous,’ she said.
At the next station a porter fetched my bags immediately, and transferred them to the first-class compartment. I felt as if a protective veil had fallen between me and the rest of the world, whereas before I had been naked.
The train began to move again, and I sat back and rested my head against the cushioned softness. I could scarcely hear the rattling of the vents and the thump of the wheels. The little lamps above each seat glowed softly.
‘My name is Blanche Lepage, but I am always known as Madame Blanche,’ she said, as she reached up to unpin her hat. ‘Please call me that. There, that’s better. Would you like to make yourself a little more comfortable? No one will come in. Take off your jacket, loosen your collar. It’s a long journey at the best of times, and now, with the war – even the Paris taxis have been commandeered to take reinforcements to the front. Who cares how long it takes us to travel on our own little affairs?’
I stood to take off and carefully fold my jacket.
‘Your skirt is tight,’ said Madame Blanche. ‘Do you want to loosen it?’
I had let out the waistband already and my skirt no longer hung well. I would have to alter it again. I really didn’t know what women did about clothes when they were pregnant. It wasn’t something I’d ever heard discussed. If my mother had had another child after me, probably I’d have known.
We sat do
wn opposite each other. She wanted to talk, I could see that. She sat firm and upright, not allowing her back to touch the cushioned seat. I straightened myself.
‘You have nowhere to go,’ she said.
‘Not yet. I shall find work.’
‘What sort of work?’
‘Any sort.’
‘What experience have you got?’
‘I can nurse.’
‘Nurse – what, you’re a trained nurse? But they won’t have you in any hospital, my dear. You must know that.’
‘I’m not a trained nurse. But I assisted – a doctor I know. And I can cook, clean, sew, launder. I’ve heard there are jobs in munitions.’
‘There are, and there’ll be more. But again, not in your condition.’
‘My condition won’t last for ever.’
‘What do you mean? My poor child, if you intended to do something about it, let me tell you that it’s much too late. You would be risking your life.’
‘I didn’t mean that.’ I flushed deeply, from shame at my own ignorance, from not knowing the depth of the waters under me. ‘I mean that babies are born after nine months, aren’t they? And then I can work.’
‘And then you will have a child to care for. Unless you give it away.’
‘Give it away? To whom?’
She laughed. ‘That’s exactly the question, isn’t it? To someone who doesn’t want it, I daresay. Who won’t take care of it. Or into an orphanage, where it’ll grow up to be a servant if it’s lucky. You’ve never been inside an orphanage, I daresay. From the point of view of those in charge, it’s a good system. The babies can’t tell anyone what goes on. All they can do is cry. And after a while they stop crying. No. Let me talk to you seriously, my dear. But good heavens, here are we talking like this, and I don’t even know your name.’
‘It’s Florence.’
‘Just Florence?’
‘Florence Hirondelle,’ I said, and again she didn’t believe a word of it.
‘You’ll allow me to call you Florence? After all, I’m old enough to be your mother.’
She was, just. She would be somewhere in her late thirties, I thought, although it was difficult to tell. I could now see that her eyes were not black. They shone in the lamplight. They made me think of fruit: black grapes, which are not really black at all, or ripe dates. She had beautiful hands. They were small and strong and flexible, and she wore expensive rings. A sapphire in a nest of diamonds, a solid ruby set in claws of gold.
‘Well, Florence,’ she continued, ‘I have a little proposal to make to you. Don’t feel that you must answer me straightaway. We have plenty of time. We can chat, get to know one another. I have a basket here. We can have a little late supper. You like cold chicken? Good. So there’s no hurry. You don’t have to make your decision until we get to Paris.’
Her voice was calm again. It had roughened when she talked about the orphanage. Her voice was like the muffled beat of the train wheels. It was carrying me onward, elsewhere. It was what I wanted to hear.
4
The Aerodrome
It’s a fine, brisk day. The sky’s packed with fast-moving white clouds, and there’s no threat of rain. The atmospheric pressure is steadily high, and the barometer is set at fair.
Inside the tents, heat has collected. There are rows of camp beds, neat in the gloom. The smell is of holidays and childhood. The heavy khaki canvas filters out the sun’s brilliance and turns it green. It’s very still. When you come out of the tent, the world looks pink for a few minutes.
Will Hazell lies on his back on the camp bed third from the tent-flap. His arms pillow his head. Will breathes in through his nose, out through his mouth. The sound of his breathing is soft, but definite. It’s a good sound. He listens to the draw of his breath, watches the rise and fall of his chest. You could go into a dream like this for hours. He can switch off and watch an ant walk from one side of the blanket to another. It doesn’t bore him, no matter how long it takes.
His mind is stretched, blank. It’s something to do with the way they sleep, or don’t sleep. The way hours of green calm are punctuated by a fury of sound and heat and smoke, the buffet of shell explosions, the brilliant edges of clouds, the zizz and stitch of machine-gun fire. The frenzy of not knowing what the hell is going on and yet being in charge of it. Only afterwards it starts to make shapes. The shapes make it safe. The clipped clichés make it safe. Say them over and over and over and they’ll come true.
It was a bloody good show over Oppy. How many hostiles? Did you see me side-slip? I had the bugger on my tail. Thought I’d stall but I pulled out of it all right.
All of them learn the clipped words, no matter where they come from. It’s a new language and you wear it like a mask. No one has seen or described these things before.
Frizell told his story in the Mess, how he held his course at five hundred feet along the railway. There was Archie everywhere and he could see the men looking up and pointing their rifles at him. He knew where he had to lay his egg. There was a junction outside the station. The Huns were bringing up troop trains, packed with reinforcements. That was the language you had to use. You didn’t speak of men.
Frizell leaned against the piano and shaped what had happened. But Will had seen him land, seen Frizell walk away unwounded from his shot-up plane. His face was wet and wild, and one hand went up as if to tell the sky what had happened. Frizell halted and stood directly in front of Will. He was a big man, the handsomest man in the Mess. His skin was brown, his eyes the blue of water with Robin starch in it. He stopped in front of Will and seized his hand. Frizell’s grip was icy. He was a boy, Will thought. He stopped in front of Will because his father wasn’t there.
‘God has been good to me… He has been good to me,’ he stammered. His eyes had a gloss on them like drunkenness, his face was out of shape. But in the Mess, Frizell was back to himself. He had gone down to five hundred feet but it wasn’t enough. He had gone down to three hundred feet, two hundred feet, a hundred and fifty. He’d kept the track bouncing dead below him as the Nieuport took the rip of bullets along the port wing and Archie exploded all around him. There was a machine-gun emplacement on the station roof. Frizell had seen the face of the gunner through the smoke. But he held on and there was the train. He dived and laid his egg just where he ought and then he pulled the nose up sharp, so sharp he nearly stalled but the explosion pushed him on up. He had got the train. He was so low by then that he nearly hit a nest of telegraph wires. They were still firing on him. There was oil leaking everywhere and his engine had missed all the way back, with the wind against him.
The wind is always against them. The westerly prevailing wind pushes them deep over the German lines, and doesn’t want to let them come home.
God has been good to me… He has been good to me. Frizell won’t want to remember that. They were all pressing close around Frizell in the Mess. The blaze in his face had gone out. He was himself again, the handsome bastard with the luck that everyone wanted.
Green calm goes on collecting in the warm, quiet tent. Beyond the tents, beyond the fields and hangars, beyond the aerodrome – but not so very far beyond – there’s the front. The sound of the guns is like that of an unfamiliar but vital industrial process. A few miles from Will, men in trenches are sweating, packed into the tiny homes they’ve created from boards and mud. They pick lice from the seams of their tunics. The lice crunch and bleed a little dark-brown blood. The men boil up water and swallow the rum issue. They bind the sores on their feet and grease their guns. Will knows what they do, but he is not part of it. He is a birdman and his job lies above.
He has been six days in France. These first two to three weeks are the most dangerous for a new pilot. He was sent out from England in haste. He knew how to fly but not how to fly and fire and navigate and keep watch at the same time. They’d half-trained him.
Policy dictates that there are never any empty seats at the Mess table. From a distance it looks as if no one ever dies
. One face replaces another, as if on a shift system. If Will learns quickly, if he makes a fast, strong climb towards the knowledge no one back in a training camp in England can give, he might get through. They’ve given him a Nieuport and he trained on a Pup. He’s flown the Nieuport every hour he’s had. He’ll fly it until he knows it. He’ll get the better of it.
He lies still in the tent. His eyes are not quite shut. He’s aware of light and shade: more light as someone lifts the tent-flap, shadow again as a body fills the entrance, light as the newcomer pads towards his camp bed, lies down carefully so that it won’t creak too loudly. They are careful of each other’s sleep.
When it gets warmer they’ll put the camp beds under the trees in daytime. That’s where they’ll rest, between shows. Will’s always had a dream about sleeping in a bed out in green fields. Safe and snug in the blankets, white sheets up to his chin while the clouds sail overhead and the world goes on with its work. Snug as a bug in a rug. There won’t be white sheets, of course. One hour they will be lying on their backs, faces stroked by the warm summer wind, and the next they will be bucking in high cloud, riding the lumpiness of air that looks so pure from below.
You need sleep so much. He would never have thought he would need to sleep so much. Twelve hours isn’t near enough. He sees that same desire in all the faces around him. They want to be in the black, as he does. Pinned down by heavy clothes, by coats.
For the next few hours he knows he won’t die. Out of habit, he has begun a letter to his wife, and it lies beside his bed.
I hope you are…
What does he hope she is?
In the tent the light is green. Outside, the grass is thick and deep by the hedges. Will has walked through it, waded thigh-deep in it, watched its pollen brush off onto him. Where one of the tents has been moved recently, there’s a long yellow oblong with new green shoots among the etiolated grass. There are scuff marks where the entry was.
Cow-parsley, buttercup and wild garlic are flowering, wood-pigeons roll the sound of summer over and over inside their throats. It’s idyllic. There’s a stream, a little bridge, a farmhouse. There’s even a rumour that someone’s got hold of a cow and there’s going to be fresh milk in the Mess.