Émilie had helped him back to bed, seeming to hurt him deliberately. He was sweating. He closed his eyes, exhausted. Either way, it was done.
Benedict, Amiens,
June 1916
L
ORD KITCHENER HAD BEEN LOST
in the sinking of the
Hampshire
, the French were mired in their forts around Verdun, and the town of Albert was all ruin, nerves, and bad news. But Benedict thought that in Amiens, for a little while, one could pretend things would work out.
Some big push was coming, perhaps within days, but for now he had forty-eight hours of leave; and after days of rain, the sun had broken out, although there was a strong breeze. From where he sat, looking across the river, the great cathedral was half mountain crag, half ship. The eye traveled upward to it from the old city below, which was half land, half water: the river, the quayside, and the narrow waterways; the grid of tiny canals crossed by simple bridges. On the Somme itself, at its widest part, the river was clogged with barges, barge after barge with a red cross on almost every roof.
Men and women in uniform dominated the quayside, but a few bars and cafés were open; a family with three small children sat noisily at one. He’d heard that the city was being evacuated, but there were still plenty of citizens who appeared to be biding their time.
He took a table next to one where two English women—nurses, he guessed—were being persuaded by the proprietor to try local mussels.
He didn’t dare order mussels, so he pointed to the dish in front of the French family and nodded and then, as an afterthought, asked for brandy. When the elderly waiter went back into the café without demurral, he assumed he’d asked for the wrong drink.
The bells rang the hour. Foreign-sounding and thinner than the bells at home, the twelve alternating strokes resonated in stars of pink and then pewter gray.
Tiny clouds were moving swiftly across a fragile blue sky and seagulls swooped down the quayside, strutting aggressively, perhaps lured by a memory of better times when barges held edible cargoes and café-goers had bread to spare. He watched them until something startled them, and his eyes followed them as they rose with heavy wingbeats into the air.
The river smelled slightly of drains, but the slight wind ruffled the lime trees and he could smell those too. From time to time as the wind changed direction, he thought he caught the smell of the hospital barges: sweat, carbolic, festering wounds, ether.
A French officer tapped him lightly on the arm. “Cigarette?” he said, holding a silver case toward him.
Benedict shook his head.
“Merci. Non.”
The officer smiled; his teeth were very white against his black beard, yet now that he studied the man more closely, he could see the lines of fatigue behind the handsome face. The man had already turned to offer cigarettes to the young nurses.
A brandy materialized in front of him. He looked away; a camouflaged truck drove past, followed by an Army staff car. He picked up his glass; the brandy was almost undrinkable. From behind him, he heard the French officer say “How do you do,” in an accent that wouldn’t have sounded out of place in the mouth of a comic foreigner on the stage, and the nurses burst into loud laughter. Chairs scraped, and the next time he looked, the officer was somehow between them.
He looked from the three of them laughing in the sun and then to the nearest barge and then down at the piece of meat resting on his meager piece of pickled cabbage. He cut it, and what looked like a fan of brown entrails sprang out.
When a hand fell on his shoulder, he expected it to be the Frenchman and dreaded being asked to join their jolly table; but then a voice said “Well, what a coincidence,” and he recognized the greeting and his neck felt tight just as he turned and saw, to his astonishment, that it was indeed Theo. Theo looking dashing in an eccentric version of his Flying Corps uniform. Theo grinning, bonier and evidently excited to see him. Theo instantly opposite him, blocking out the view, trying his brandy and ordering one himself as well as a pot of mussels. Theo, and Benedict’s eyes went to the hand and moved swiftly away.
“You look well,” Theo said. “Are you well? Is life being at all kind?”
Benedict found himself nodding rather than speaking. “Leave,” he said. “I go back tonight.”
All at once he wanted to weep.
“Just the thing. How unutterably splendid. I’m off for the day. They say it’s the last leave for a while.”
Theo made a face: the same face he’d made at Gloucester when Dr. Brewer had rehearsed the choir endlessly. Benedict thought he was avoiding making more than fleeting eye contact. Had he always been like this?
“Have you been back to Blighty?” Theo said, as if they had known each other, vaguely, in the past.
“Not for months.”
In truth, although pleased to see his sister back in March, and to wash regularly and have his uniform cleaned, Benedict had been bored rigid at home. He’d played the tiny, wheezing organ in the parish church, been admired by the old ladies, and spent much of the time asleep.
“You?”
“Went home. Saw Father. Current stepmother-to-be. All very pleasant, but nothing had changed. Which was odd, because
I
had, and yet nobody seemed to notice. Dropped by Gloucester.”
“How was Agnes?”
Theo waved an arm. “Obliging. Let me kiss her. Terribly excited by the uniform.”
Benedict wondered what Dr. Brewer had thought or said, seeing Theo’s mutilated hand.
“Have you arranged a date? For the wedding?” he said.
Theo drank the brandy as if it were water, then shuddered.
“God, this is repulsive stuff. A man would need to be seriously committed to drunkenness to get in the habit of it. No, of course I haven’t. She might be a widow in a month.”
“But you are engaged to be married?”
“Oh, absolutely. Completely. Announcement in
The Times
any day now. Squeezed in between the casualty lists.”
After all the years of friendship, Benedict still couldn’t sense whether Theo was making the whole thing up, nor could he ever tell him how much he hoped the story of his courtship and his plans for marriage were another fantasy. More and more, he thought they were.
“Mind you,” his friend said, “she’d look marvelous in black, don’t you think? Trouble is,” he went on without waiting for an answer, “I wouldn’t be there to see it. Some other bugger would, and he’d be consoling her in less time than it takes to say ‘staff officer.’”
The mussels arrived in a steaming pot and Theo, insisting that Benedict eat with him, set to, discarding some, tapping others on the rim, sucking out the tiny pieces of flesh as if he had lived on mussels all his life. His scarred hand lifted—it never fully unfolded, Benedict noticed; it was an implement, but one that had lost its fine movement—then set down the empty shells, and eventually he mopped up the liquor with a chunk of bread.
When he’d finished, he sat back contentedly for as much as a minute before summoning the waiter in passable French and paying the bill.
“No,” he put the hand on Benedict’s arm. Their khaki cuffs touched. “I owe you some mussels, for God’s sake.” Perhaps he hadn’t noticed that Benedict had no shells in front of his own plate. “I owe you a mountain of mussels; every mussel from the Bay of the Somme. For being an unspeakable rotter. I’m astonished you’ll even sit down with me.”
Benedict thought how like Theo it was to overlook the fact that it was Theo who had sat down with
him
, embarrassed, perhaps, but assuming a welcome.
“For God’s sake, old chap,” Theo said, “you’re my best friend, I’m feeling a bit blue, and suddenly here you are, always calm and cheerful. Nobody in the world I’d rather have bumped into.”
He looked down at the remnants of Benedict’s lunch, said
“Andouillette,”
reached for the sausage, and put it in his mouth.
“And anyway, I’m sorry. Again. I was drunk. I was vilely, horribly drunk. Mad. A lunatic.”
Benedict was still considering a reply when Theo said “I mean, thank God you’re not dead, or I would have expired of guilt and probably boredom. I should have written. But I couldn’t even remember what I’d done, said. . . . Didn’t want to remember, to tell you the truth.”
Benedict watched Theo’s eager, but slightly drawn, face. He had nothing to say. He nodded very slowly. He looked beyond Theo to the cathedral.
“So you’ll come back to Harmony Cottage?” Theo said.
Benedict hadn’t thought of it and was surprised to find that the idea, which had once given him such happiness and provided the illusion of a refuge, simply brought back all the wretchedness and violence of their last weeks there together. All he could taste was rancid meat.
But “Yes,” he said. “Yes. Of course.”
“I’m still flying,” Theo said. “Thank God. Officially subject to a medical checkup every three months, but the M.O.’s never likely to get around to it.”
Perhaps the flying would make it all right, Benedict thought. Perhaps if music could be kept outside their lives.
“My arm… .” Theo rubbed it. “It aches and it’s clumsy, but it does the job.
That
job, anyway. I have to say Agnes was rather impressed.” Then, “Let’s walk,” he said.
They crossed the bridge immediately ahead of them. A steep flight of old brick stairs rose over one of the narrow canals, took them past the watergates of tall houses, and then led them to a small green tucked below the cathedral. The grass was worn—a French soldier lay under its only tree, with a woman and a baby. They looked happy enough.
There was nothing but cathedral now: his gaze was drawn upward toward the disordered jungle of tiny spires and solid towers, of gargoyles, lead spouts, and tracery, which ended only with the sky. Gargoyles had been part of Benedict’s life since he was a child. At Gloucester, the green men playing lutes, the snouted beasts, the great cats and winged dragons had been stone fairytales. But the Amiens figures were creatures of real horror: toothless, slobbering, clawing, shrouded or with empty eye sockets, created out of fear and probably drawn from life. From the ancient stonework rose one great shriek of pain and despair.
He knew the cathedral had a newly restored organ; he had seen pictures of it in that other life he had once lived. It would have been impossible to turn away without giving a reason, but all Benedict wanted was to see it as a Gothic masterpiece and not confront it as a place where music was made.
His father had spoken of Roman Catholic churches as dark, gilded, elaborate caves for the worst kinds of popish practices: incense, glittering treasuries, relics, martyrs, superstitious locals bowing and crossing themselves. But as the heavy door thudded shut, what lay before Benedict was the embodiment of grace and light: pale, fine columns to either side of a narrow nave, rising unornamented to a great height. Only near the altar had the symmetry been interrupted. Rough-cut wooden struts braced the columns, and sandbags surrounded individual monuments. The largest window was boarded up. As they moved forward, mortar crunched underfoot. He looked down. They were walking across a black-and-white labyrinth, its pattern neatly filling the central nave and now covered with grit. Beyond it, the golden sun rays of the altar were screened by planks. Two old ladies sat, dark shadows in black hats, just below the pulpit.
Fighting had yet to reach this ancient city; yet the cathedral’s message was that come it would and, too large to armor itself externally, it was defending its heart. Benedict felt ferocious anger, somehow more than he’d allowed himself to feel for all the damaged human flesh and shattered minds that had become his daily life. The destruction of so much genius, so much history: and for what?
“Benedict.”
Theo was gazing up at the organ, its painted pipes high above the business of the church, almost to the roof. As he stood there, the door to the cathedral opened and a shaft of light sliced in; a dark figure, a man, Benedict thought, stood there before coming in and walking down an aisle toward a side chapel. Benedict could smell his cigarette smoke.
Theo called him. He had moved to the far right of the west door in front of what seemed likely to be the door to the organ loft. It was small and insignificant enough. Clearly it was locked, but Theo was feeling along the lintel above it. Then he moved to a funerary inscription a few yards away. He felt above the scrolls and carved urn. Shook off a spider.
He stood back. His eyes scanned the door and its immediate surroundings, then moved swiftly to a carved marble angel holding an open book. He stood on tiptoe, reached up, and then brandished a key.
“We can’t go up.” But even as he spoke, Benedict knew that they would.
“Oh, but we can.” The key turned easily in the lock.
Benedict knew his face was full of doubt, and he hated himself for it.
“For God’s sake, man. It was restored only twenty-five years ago, by Cavaillé-Coll, no less. And it’s five hundred years old. You know it is. You’re an organist: how can you
not
want to go up there?”
When Benedict still hesitated, Theo rushed on. “Look around. What do you see? They know what’s going to happen here. Even if
you
survive all this, what might you never see again, hear again? This organ.”
Benedict dipped his head to pass under the low arch and came to the stone steps of a spiral staircase. The treads were narrow and deep and, as he followed Theo upward, he held tight to a sagging rope handrail. At the top they reached scuffed floorboards. Theo was searching for a light. Eventually he found the oil lamp they both knew must be here and lit it with his cigarette lighter.
In front of them lay the marvel of pipes, bellows, and the mechanisms that revealed the secrets only organists saw. With another rasp of the flint, the light was lit over the console. It was stuffy up here, and the organ had not been played for a while, it seemed; there was light dust on the keys. He could hear pigeons on the roof, see specks of light through the timbers, but Theo seemed oblivious to anything but the organ itself. He unbuttoned his tunic and slung it to one side, sat at the console, legs extended, and eventually looked up at Benedict.