“It settled into a routine then. They weren’t moving and neither were we, and the new faces either vanished or something inside them vanished and they weren’t new any more. We’d try to sleep by day and swatch off the flies, and at night go on with the business of living, scurry down to the beaches for water, walk back like pack mules carrying whatever they’d give us. At intervals there’d be another push, we’d
get
the word and off across the ridges at dawn, with the sun behind us shining in their eyes or the mist if we were lucky, and when the sun dispersed, whatever advantage it had given us, it would begin again, the fusillade of small dull pops, the whirring like the wings of a small bird, or the tearing of the air above us and the silence, then the boom, the groans of whoever took it. We stuck together, the two of us, learnt to embrace the sharp stones underneath our boots. I heard the rending of the air once and with the boom felt a kick in my back like a mule and was thrown six feet sideways, then felt nothing. When I woke the sun was gone again, there was a beautiful calm to the moonlight, pale curtains of mist over every ridge. I rubbed my back and shoulder and could feel the tiny incisions of shrapnel all over the khaki. I turned on my back and could see the Pleiades above through the thin night haze. If I had died, I remember thinking, it could not have been more peaceful.
“I lay in that delicious absence of effort, of any need to move at all, for hours. But I suspected I hadn’t died, there being a corpse to my left and the sound of groaning some distance away from me which soon, mercifully, stopped. There was a smell of thyme. Then a figure walked through those delicate mists, dispersing them as he walked, huge steps over the outcrops of thyme, and I recognised nine-fingered George.
“ ‘Couldn’t you have come later?’ I asked him.
“ ‘No,’ he said, bending and lifting me in one easy move. ‘Why would I come later?’
“ ‘Because,’ I told him, ‘it felt like peace.’”
D
EAR JANIE
, I am in Liverpool, moving towards Wales, please give the enclosed letter to my father. Sister Catherine said acting would never be remotely appropriate for a Siena girl, but here I am, acting the part of the Colleen Bawn, Eily O’Connor, not Rosalind by any means but sufficient to the day the evil thereof. Eily is thought to be drowned in a lake by the hunchback Danny Mann, but comes back to life by the good graces of Myles na gCopaleen, Myles of the Ponies, if you don’t remember your Irish which I for one hardly do. I hope to see you some day, in England if you ever get here or in Ireland if I ever get back there. Meanwhile, thinking of you and your brother and my brother too. Your dear friend, Nina.
~
“There was a hill,” says Gregory, “it had been taken and abandoned and now had to be taken again. We could see the low sweep of the land down to the dry salt-lake behind us, looping like a pearl necklace towards the beach and the sea. We never knew why we were moving, what we were moving towards, sometimes we didn’t know where. But when we were told to go, we went. There was waist-high grass or barley or wheat with clumps of flowerless gorse and they were throwing so much at us that the ridge caught fire, all the grass and gorse bushes burning, flames licking over the flinty ground in a lazy sweep and then the smell of burning flesh, of the ones that had dropped, the cries of the ones still living, burnt alive. And as the smoke rose up it made a curtain, I fell into a trench and the flames licked over it, the smoke filled it, I would have died there, roasted, asphyxiated. I had lost George somewhere up ahead and I grabbed a trench shovel, so hot it burnt my hands, and I crawled out again, beat my way through the smoke and flames with the red-hot shovel and I found him there, the biggest shape lying there, burning, all of his giant length burning. And I pulled him towards a small hollow where the flames had exhausted whatever vegetation there was, and as the flames and smoke died down the bullets again found whoever was unlucky enough to be visibly squirming there and finished them off, and maybe it was better that way.
“Then finally the sun went down and the guttering hillside grew quiet except for the cries of those left there, still alive. George was one of those, his face unrecognisable. I wormed forwards through the ashes to collect the water cans of the dead ones and brought them back, poured whatever I found through his roasted lips. I could see his eyes then, lashless, eyebrowless, pleading, and I knew they were pleading with me to somehow end it for him. I couldn’t, though pity churned in my stomach like sour milk, and I did what I knew even then would haunt me, what he could never thank me for. I brought the shovel over, turned his body so the charred seat of his trousers lay on the broad flat of it, I grabbed the haft and dragged it like a sled, down the charred hillside.
“The moon was up by the time I had left the smoke behind. He must have been unconscious because all I could hear was his laboured breathing through burnt nostrils. I reached the salt-lake and pulled him across the flat, leaving a crabbed trail in the salt behind me. The cracked salt beneath me reminded me of the cracked mudflats of Mozambique when the tide was out, but these were saltflats and a dirty white: memory and comparison were like a negative photograph—what had been dark was light, what had been light was dark. I made it through the loop to the sand and dragged him to the water, looking for a hospital boat, and saw one out there, pulling away. And I took him in my arms and managed not to fall with the weight of him and walked into the water, and I swear as the seawater lapped over his body his body sizzled and steamed. He moaned then, with the pain of the saltwater, and the moan was like a dying swan or a swan that wished it could die. The boat heard him and stopped its rowing and waited until I reached them. Two orderlies reached down and unceremoniously lifted him in. I stood there, waist deep in the water as it drew away, and wondered what malignant destiny had left me there, apparently living and apparently unharmed.”
“They searched the townland for her,” says Janie, “for a week or so thought she had died, till the letter arrived. And I walked up to the house that seemed so empty, without her, without him, found her father alone in the glasshouse with his leather gloves on, head down among the tomato plants, and gave him the letter.
“ ‘Tell me anything you know, please Janie,’ he said.
“ ‘She’s in Liverpool, moving towards Wales with a theatre troupe,’ I said, ‘I only know what she wrote, maybe there’s more inside there.’
“And he opened the letter in front of me. I could hear the slow drip of the hose and the sound of the paper tearing, the sound of his glasses coming out of his top pocket. And he read with that strange stillness that seemed to imply a death of kinds, and maybe for him it was. He seemed to age as he read it, two pages it was, in her neat handwriting, always better than mine.
“ ‘Thank you, Janie,’ he said finally, and folded it neatly, placed it with his glasses in the top pocket of his frayed gardening coat. ‘I’ve lost them both,’ he said, and turned back to the tomato plants.
“And I walked back out round the side of the old house, and down the drive I saw her mother coming towards me, two golf clubs in her hand. She was wearing a winter coat, I remember, though it was still summer, late summer but still warm. She must have known I had news, but she passed me without saying a word, and from that I could only presume that whatever news I had, she didn’t want to hear.”
“I found it difficult to die, though, ironically given that there was nothing but death all around me. There was no more push after that. The heat subsided, the summer was nearly over. I longed for the insane order to come, to walk blindly towards the bullet that would finish me, but no such order came. The Tenth Division left, went to Salonika I was told, but what was left of our division stayed, first there, last there. The swallows curved in arcs above us, the stench and the flies subsided, and the place became almost beautiful. There were rumours everywhere, exhaustion had congealed us into a very specific kind of torpor, an awful autumnal splendour wrapped the whole peninsula which made even dying seem ridiculous. Generals came and went, surveyed the few of us left from the first landing. A motor-launch came off the
Lord Nelson
and it was rumoured the old walrus, Kitchener himself, was on it. I saw a glint from a pair of binoculars above Anzac cove, rumoured to be his. I trained my rifle on it, imagined I saw those famous moustaches through the heat haze way beyond, thought how simple it would be to squeeze and wondered would it feel like vengeance. But I lacked the courage and realised there was one sensation I would never fully know.”
~
She played Eily as she grew bigger beside me, and I played Grace until she grew too big to play anything, then I played Eily in her place. They forgot about Grace, reduced the play to exclude her, and if it didn’t make sense nobody cared since not many were listening anyway. There was a hall in each of those Lancashire seaside towns to accommodate us; we left the marquee behind us in a Liverpool warehouse on the biggest stretch of dockland I had ever seen. The pier stretching out to the whipped green sea with the circular end to it, the wooden boardwalk a cathedral of lights—I had never seen such delicacy, such vulgarity, such muchness, so to speak. Crowds everywhere, late summer crowds, girls my own age with men in uniform, arms linked, the electric lights playing on their faces like reflected water. I walked arm-in-arm with Eily, Maggie was her real name, and felt against my elbow the strength of her hardening belly. The comedian at Margate, after the warm-up to our show, tried to touch me in the wings. His hand on my belly, heading downwards. I bit his ear until it bled and he couldn’t dare let out a scream.
“Woah, woah, missus,” he said, “it’s not the end of the world.”
“Isn’t it?” I asked him.
I could see Maggie through the flaring lights in the voluminous skirt that hid her condition. Samuel was the father’s name: Samuel and Margaret, she would say like a litany, Maggie and Sam. He was a beekeeper in Somerset awaiting her return: she would stop off there and have the baby, leave the troupe while it moved to Brighton. We met two soldiers on the pier and allowed them to walk us down the boardwalk twice and a stop for ices.
“At Passchaendale,” the dark-eyed one told us, “you could hear the guns roar long after they had stopped.”
“I can hear them still,” the blue-eyed one told us.
“So what’s it like?” I asked.
“The sound?” the blue-eyed one asked.
“Do I detect an accent?” the brown-eyed one said. “Irish?”
“Irish,” I said, “but tell me what’s it like. I have a brother over there.”
“Like the end of the world,” said the brown-eyed one, and I thought of the comedian and his hand on my belly. He held my hand on the way back and tried to kiss me under the eaves in the street. I turned my head this way and that and then let him kiss me anyway, and thought of Gregory.
“Where’s your brother?” he asked me, making conversation.
“He’s with the Dubliners,” I said.
“They’re not in France,” he said, “they’re in the Dardanelles.”
“Where are the Dardanelles?” I asked him, and added, since it felt more like conversation, “when they’re at home?”
“Near Constantinople,” he said, “fighting the Turk.”
S
TORMS CAME, TOOK
away the piers on the beaches, flooded the trenches. We crawled out of them to save ourselves from drowning and saw the Turks across the ridges do the same; we could have picked each other off like wet rats but there were other things to think about. Then the snows came, gentle at first, a dusting of white over the whole peninsula. Blizzards then, and the temperature plummeted, blackened hands and faces, we burnt everything we could find to warm our frostbitten fingers and began to miss the flies and heat.”
~
We moved further south towards Wales, and the towns got smaller and the halls now were parish halls, where stern revivalist meetings happened of a Sunday and where a pregnant leading lady could cause a true scandal, so I took Maggie’s place and got the part of Eily. Maggie restitched her costumes for me, tucked them in at the waist and complimented me on what she called my demeanour.
“You could go far,” she said, “with a carriage like that, with looks like that.
“What do you mean by carriage?” I asked her, and she answered, “I mean a way of walking, I mean a certain poise that the real divas have.”
“What about you,” I asked her, “won’t you go far?”
“I’ll go as far as Somerset,” she told me, “I’ll have the baby and Sam will marry me and we’ll settle in a cottage and sell honey to the apple farmers.”
She didn’t know about my happenstance and so whenever I asked to place a hand on her belly and feel the life inside, my tears would perplex her.
“Why are you crying?” she would ask. “I’m the one who should be crying, the fallen woman, the girl undone.”
“There are other ways of falling,” I told her, “I’m something of an expert in all of them.”
At night sometimes I could feel the tiny feet kicking from her soundly sleeping body beside me. How could she sleep, I would wonder, with so much life going on inside her? But she was easy-going, Maggie, things that would have bothered others didn’t bother her a bit; she was part of the grass that grew and the world that turned and she woke up each morning like it was her first. Her first day in a whole new world. I would reach out in the darkness and place my hand on her stomach, feel it shifting under the flannel nightdress, and her hand would reach up and hold down mine. She would press her fingers between the gaps in mine and both of our hands would rub her stomach gently, her asleep, me soon to be, because the feel of her skin was the only thing that would bring tiredness on.
Sleep seemed an unreachable comfort without her beside me, without that large pod within which the seed was growing. I felt emptier than the emptiest thing, emptier than a seabed from which the ocean had retreated, emptier than the dried mudflats of Mozambique at the lowest tide. There were dried tears behind my eyes, parched by the emptiness and sometimes, with the comfort of her hand on mine, came the comfort of them flowing. I would cry then, and feel the velvet curtain of sleep and oblivion descending.