A Long Long Way (42 page)

She had only come in for something small, the nurse, his sweet-smelling nurse with the hair the colour of conkers.

‘Will you — will you,’ he began with difficulty, like his head was being pitched about like a football kicked away out to sea.

‘What, Private?’ said the nurse.

‘Will — you — will you — hold me?’ he said with a gasp, and many a stupid-sounding splutter. He was no better than an idiot like that, well he knew it. He would have no world at all like that, for ever more.

‘I can’t do that,’ she said. ‘It isn’t allowed at all.’

‘Please — please — please,’ he said, oh, his chin jutting, and turning, and turning, eyes darting, and darting.

‘All right,’ she said coldly enough.

And she gathered him into her arms. She was wearing a blue overall over her white dress, against the spits and all the rest. It occurred to him then that she was spat on by him, just as he had been spat on and stoned by those boys of Dublin Town. She gathered him in.

He closed his eyes and Gretta’s face slowly filtered in. All the ache and murder of the last years just for a moment ceased — ceased to write itself in the history of his addled blood. He hung suspended, beautifully aloft, somewhere, he knew not where, with Gretta’s face, her breast, her arms about him. He was surprised by the soft silence, as if his brain had been a noisy place lately. Curiously, to him, the face was not her face now, but the face he supposed as it might be in times to come — the trim contours of the jaw were no more, the eyes were hooded, she was altered by time and how he wished he was to be the man to comfort her in that and avow to her that no lessening of youth would bring a lessening of love. How he wished he was to be the man who would be old beside her, and herself old. Going about the town like two old lizards.

‘I’ll just hold you now a few moments,’ she said. ‘In a motherly way, mind.’

‘Oh yes,’ he said. Motherly.

Then the tender miracle happened. He would have to call himself the Miraculous Dunne after that, like old Quigley himself, God rest him. Oh, God rest him, and God rest them all. His own body was suddenly strangely at rest, and deliciously.

Her breasts were pressed against his arm, he couldn’t help noticing. They were small and hard and cold, not at all like Gretta’s. She seemed to him suddenly a sad person, a saddened person, a sad nurse. Maybe her sadness had cured him. Could it have been? he wondered.

St George’s Military Hospital,
Shropshire.
June 1918.

Dear Papa,

‘ I have been in hospital a while in England but you are not to worry, I am better now and am being sent back to the war. We were left in trenches a long while near Ypres and everyone was tired and then there was a bomb. I was not injured but I began to tremble and could not stop, so they took me to England. I was here a good few weeks. Now I can hold a pencil again and write to you, Papa. In these last days I have been thinking a lot in my bed and I have been thinking about you and Mam and the old days. I was thinking how strange it was when Mam died that things were still pleasing to a child and that was because you bestirred yourself and were a good father. I was lying there thinking how it might have been, two young girls and a boy and a baby girl into the bargain. So how did you manage all that? It was a wonderful thing to do, to hold us to you, and make all those teas, Papa, and find time to play with us, and when you did give out it was for good reason. Do you remember, Papa, the time you took us on the Liffey ferry over to the Great South Wall? And how you knew the old captain in the old house and we all went up to his lookout room at the top of the house and looked out over the river? And you showed us the red lighthouse and the green lighthouse? And how sunny it was that day, and we walked along past the sentries on the wall, and you showed us the long buttery stones the seawall was made out of, and when we got to the Pigeon House we all had to sing that old song you had taught us, ’Weile Weile Waile‘, you put the four of us up on the steps there, and you said, ’Sing for your mam now.‘ And the gulls were very surprised. I was lying in bed and wondering why you did that. As a child nothing seems strange. Now that seems very strange and wonderful. I am going back to the war and will not be home I think till next year. I wanted to say in this letter that I have been thinking about all that has happened to me, and many another thing. And how some of those things made me start thinking in a different light about things, and how that offended you so grievously. And I understand why. But it cannot change the fact that I believe in my heart that you are the finest man I know. When I think of you there is nothing bad that arises at all. You stand before me often in my dreams and in my dreams you seem to comfort me. So I am sending this letter with my love, and thinking of you.

Your son,

Willie.

Start thinking in a different light ... Some of his new thoughts offended even him. It had nothing to do with kings and countries, rebels or soldiers. Generals or their dark ambitions, their plus and their minus. It was that Death himself had made those things ridiculous. Death was the King of England, Scotland and Ireland. The King of France. Of India, Germany, Italy, Russia. Emperor of all the empires. He had taken Willie’s companions, lifted away entire nations, looked down on their struggles with contempt and glee. The whole world had come out to decide some muddled question, and Death in delight rubbed his bloody hands.

You couldn’t blame King George, God knew. You couldn’t even hardly blame the fucking Kaiser. Not any more. Death now had a hold on the whole matter.

And his loyalty, his old faith in the cause, as a man might say, a dozen times so sorely tested, was dying in Willie Dunne. An ember maybe only remaining, for his father’s sake.

She shaved him so gently it was like being shaved by a human smile. She lathered up his whiskers and with a blade as sharp as marram-grass she took off the black beard. She pushed the strands together in a little sheaf and put them in what she called the ‘Hair Box’. What she did with them then he didn’t know. His friend from Clonmel.

Chapter Twenty-Three

It was almost a jaunty, happy thing to go back to his regiment, what remained of it. All in his youth and prime, like the song said. To the extent that a man with a broken heart could be happy. To the extent that a man with the soul filleted out of him could be happy. Since the things he had wished for were no more, he wished for nothing. He breathed in and out. That was all. That was where the war had brought him, he thought.

There was a terrible lack of new Irishmen now in the army. You could hardly meet another fella in transit. It had all dried up, those thoughts and deeds of’ 14. It was all a thing long done and past. No one now thought it was a good notion to kit up against the Kaiser and go to Flanders. The 16th was gone the way of all old, finished things. He read again and again in the paper that the Irish that remained couldn’t really be trusted. So they had stuffed the gaps in the 16th with what English and Scottish and Welsh they could muster. An Irish soldier these days might as soon run as fight. The Mutineer himself in fact said it, and he should have known better, their own general. Ceased to exist! And then to be blamed for that themselves. That was a test of loyalty anyhow, to hear a thing like that, never mind a rake of Germans rushing at you. But Willie heard it said on the trains; he could smell that opinion almost in the sea air of Southampton. Better forget about the Irish. They always had been a strange crowd, anyhow. Well, that was just an old song of those days. It wasn’t ‘Tipperary’ any more and ’Goodbye Leicester Square‘.

Between your own countrymen deriding you for being in the army, and the army deriding you for your own slaughter, a man didn’t know what to be thinking. A man’s mind could be roaring out in pain of a sort. The fact that the war didn’t make a jot of sense any more hardly came into it.

He was twenty-one now. That was a grown man, right enough. He couldn’t cross back quick enough. It was very strange to him. All the ‘valleys of death’ he had been through, all the fields of dead men, all the insane noise, and wastage of living hearts, you would think would have deterred him mightily. He didn’t understand the war in the upshot, and he had thought to himself a dozen times and more that no one on earth understood it rightly. And he certainly didn’t desire it and he feared it like the hunted animal fears the hunter and the hounds — but all the same he grew happier the closer he drew to his friends. A sort of happiness he feared he could have nowhere else. If he thought of Dolly, indeed, he felt tearful. If he thought of Gretta he felt as if he must stop breathing and die. Indeed, he could cry at the shortest notice, queer little things set him off, a fag butt thrown on the ground, the whistling of a lonely bird, he had to stop and collect himself, let the crying stop, and the shaking stop. He didn’t really care if anyone saw him. That wasn’t important. If it looked like cowardice, it looked like cowardice, and that was that. He knew that it was just that he was a man with bits of himself broken. That’s all it fucking was. In those moments he was as weak as a newborn lamb; the weakest soldier in Germany could have killed him with his breath. But still he hurried back along the ways of the war, and with a curious pride he came into the place where his new platoon was set, and gave Christy Moran a glad hello, and received one back, and an embrace.

‘I thought I would not see you again, Willie,’ said the company sergeant-major.

‘I don’t blame you,’ said Willie Dunne. ‘Are there any of the other lads I know here now?’

‘These are new lads now,’ said Christy Moran. ‘Geordies, they call themselves, each and every one. They talk so dark they might as well be fellas from the Galway islands.’

But then Willie saw a familiar face.

‘Sarge, Sarge, you didn’t tell me Joe Kielty came through.’

‘ Ah, yes. You can’t kill Joe, Willie.‘

Willie went over to the Joe Kielty who had been smiling across all the while. He took Joe’s right hand in both his hands and shook the hand.

‘Joe, you must be the best gunner in all of Flanders.’

‘Ah, not so bad.’

‘The best gunner, my God.’

‘The best runner, anyhow,’ said Joe Kielty, laughing.

‘Come here a minute,’ said the sergeant-major, and Willie followed him to a dugout. Christy Moran ducked in there and came out again carrying a thick book that Willie thought he recognized.