Birdsong. Part 27

All night he sang for his brother, whom he had brought home in his hands.

There was an excited party of young officers in the dining room of the Hotel Folkestone in Boulogne. Many of them had been at the Front no more than six months and had stories to tell their friends and families. The war was not going too badly for them. They had witnessed mutilation and death; they had undergone the physical discomfort of cold, wet, and fatigue such as they had never thought themselves capable of enduring, yet they could still see this pattern of service at the Front alternated with regular home leave as something tenable, for a short time at least. They drank champagne and boasted to one another of what they would do when they got to London. They had not been there for the great slaughters of the previous year and could not foresee the mechanized abattoir that was expected in the impa.s.sable mud of Flanders in the months to come. The horror of the entr'acte was bearable; they shuddered with the joy of survival, and chafed each other with the exhilaration of their relief. Their young voices rose like the squawl of starlings beneath the chandeliers.

Stephen heard them in his room on the first floor, where he was writing a letter to Jeanne. His hip flask, filled with the last of his whisky at Arras, was almost empty, and the ashtray was full. Unlike the men under his command, who wrote home daily, he had had little practice as a correspondent. The men's letters, which he read wearily, consisted of rea.s.surances to those at home, comments on the contents of the parcels received, and requests for more news.

Stephen did not think Jeanne needed rea.s.surance about his well-being; neither would she enjoy details of trench life. While he compelled himself not to mention Isabelle, he thought it sensible to write about things common to both him and Jeanne. This meant talking about Amiens and how its people and buildings survived.

What he wanted to say to Jeanne was that she, apart from Michael Weir, was the best friend he had. Since he might be dead within the month, there seemed no reason not to say so. He wrote: "It means a great deal to me to receive your letters, to have some contact with a sane world. I appreciate your kindness to me. Your friendship enables me to survive."

He tore up the page and threw it in the wastepaper basket by his feet. Jeanne would not appreciate such things; it was precipitate and vulgar on his part. He needed to be more formal, at least for the time being. He rested his head on his hands and tried to picture Jeanne's long, wise face in his mind.

What was this woman like? What would she want him to say? He imagined her dark brown eyes beneath their arched brows. They were intelligent, sardonic eyes, and yet they had a quality of great gentleness and compa.s.sion. Her nose was similar to Isabelle's but her mouth was wider, with a darker shade in the skin of the lips. Her chin was sharper, though quite small. The strength of her features, the darkness of her colouring, and the forbidding quality of her eyes gave her a faintly masculine appearance; yet the beauty of her pale skin, not expressive like Isabelle's but quite even in its ivory smoothness over her face and neck, spoke of extraordinary delicacy. He did not know how to approach her.

He wrote some details of his train journey to Boulogne and promised that he would write from England, when at least he would have something interesting to tell her.

When the boat arrived in Folkestone the next day there was a small crowd a.s.sembled on the quay. Many of the boys and women waved flags and cheered as the ma.s.s of infantry came up the gangplank. Stephen saw the looks on the faces of the crowd change from gaiety to bewilderment: for those come to greet sons or brothers these were the first returning soldiers they had seen. The lean, expressionless creatures who stepped ash.o.r.e were not the men with gleaming kit and plump smiles who had been played aboard by the regimental bands. Some wore animal skins they had bought from local farms; many had cut pieces from their coats with knives to increase their comfort or to bind their cold hands. They wore scarves about their heads instead of caps with shining b.u.t.tons. Their bodies and their kit were encrusted with dirt and in their eyes was a blank intransigence. They moved with grim, automatic strength. They were frightening to the civilians because they had evolved not into killers but into pa.s.sive beings whose only aim was to endure.

Stephen felt a hand on his arm. "h.e.l.lo. Are you Captain Wraysford? My name's Gilbert. I'm in charge here. Couldn't make it out with you chaps--bad leg, I'm afraid. Now look, you take these forms and when you get to the station I want you to liaise with the embarkation officer. All the men's names are here. Got that?" Stephen looked at the man in bemus.e.m.e.nt. His body gave off an acrid, rotting smell when he came close to show him the forms.

On the station platform were further crowds of well-wishers. There were tables on which voluntary organizations were offering tea and buns. Stephen walked to the head of the platform and, when he was obscured from the throng by the bulk of the red-brick waiting room, dropped the thick bundle of forms over a low wall.

The train started, men lining the corridors, sitting on their kit, smoking and laughing, waving to the people on the platform. Stephen gave his seat to a woman in a blue bonnet.

Jammed up against the window of the compartment he could see little of England as it went past in flashing squares visible only occasionally beneath the angle of his armpit. The sight of his homeland had not brought any feeling of affection or deep welcome. He was too tired to appreciate it. All he could feel was the pain in his lower back from trying not to bang his head against the luggage rack above. In time, perhaps, he would appreciate the countryside and the sounds of peace.

"I'm getting out at the next stop," said the woman in the bonnet. "Would you like me to telephone your wife or your parents and tell them you're on your way?"

"No. No, I... don't think so. Thank you."

"Where is your home?"

"Lincolnshire."

"Oh dear, that's a long way."

"I'm not going there. I'm going to... " He had had no plans. He remembered something Weir had once said to him. "To Norfolk. It's very nice at this time of year." At Victoria Station, Stephen pushed and fought his way out into the street. He wanted to see no more soldiers but to lose himself in the great blankness of the city. He walked briskly up through the park to Piccadilly, then slowly along the north side. He went into a well-stocked gentlemen's outfitter near the foot of Albemarle Street. Many of his clothes had been lost in transit a year before and he needed at least a change of shirts and underwear. He stood on the planed floorboards looking into the gla.s.s-topped cases with their extensive displays of coloured ties and socks. A man in a morning suit appeared behind the counter.

"Good morning, sir. Can I help?"

Stephen saw the man's eyes run down him and register his uniform and rank. He also saw, beneath his formal politeness, an involuntary recoil. He wondered what it was about him that repelled the man. He did not know if he smelled of chloride of lime or blood or rats. He reflexively put his hand up to his chin but felt only a minimal scratch of beard that had grown back since he had shaved in the Hotel Folkestone.

"I want some shirts, please."

The man went up a ladder and pulled out two wooden shelves which he brought down and laid in front of Stephen. There were white, stiff-fronted shirts for evening wear and collarless cotton striped for day. As Stephen demurred, the a.s.sistant brought more shelves down with shirts of every colour and fabric they had in stock. Stephen gazed at the array of pastel colours, the great arc of choice that the man fanned out in front of him, their b.u.t.tonholes finished by hand, the pleats of the cuffs nipped and pressed, their textures running from the rigid to the luxuriously soft.

"Excuse me, sir. I must just attend to this other customer while you make your choice."

The a.s.sistant backed away, leaving Stephen confused by the decision and by the man's att.i.tude to him. With the other customer, a large man in his sixties in an expensive overcoat and homburg hat, he was much more effusive. After several items had been charged to his account, the man wandered out of the shop, heavily, without acknowledging Stephen. The a.s.sistant's smile froze, then faded, as he returned. He kept a certain distance.

Eventually he said, "I don't wish to hurry you, sir, but if you're not happy with our choice it would perhaps be better if you tried elsewhere." Stephen looked at him incredulously. He was about thirty-five, with sandy hair receding on either side and a neat moustache.

"I was finding it difficult," he said. His jaw felt heavy as he spoke. He realized how tired he was. "Excuse me."

"I think perhaps it would be better if--"

"You don't want me in here, do you?"

"It's not that, sir, it's--"

"Just give me these two." He picked out the shirts nearest him. Ten years ago, he thought, he would have struck the man; but he merely offered him the money and left.

Outside, he breathed deeply in the thick air of Piccadilly. Across the street he saw the arches of the Ritz hotel, its name lit up in bulbs. Women in trimmed fur coats and their escorts in sleek grey suits and black hats went through the doors. They had an air of private urgency, as though they were bent on matters of financial significance or international weight that would not even permit them to glance toward the ingratiating smile of the doorman in his top hat and gold frogging. They disappeared through the gla.s.s, their soft coats trailing behind them, oblivious to the street or to any life but theirs.

Stephen watched for a moment, then walked along with his service valise toward Piccadilly Circus, where he bought a newspaper. There had been a financial scandal and an accident at a factory in Manchester. There was no news of the war on the front page, though later, next to the readers' letters, was a report on Fifth Army manoeuvres and warm praise for the tactical expertise of its commander. The further he walked, the more isolated he felt. He marvelled at the smoothness of the undamaged paving stones. He was glad that an ordinary life persisted in the capital, but he did not feel part of it. He would have been embarra.s.sed to be treated differently from ordinary civilians by people in a country he in any case had not lived in for some time, but it seemed strange to him that his presence was a matter not just of indifference but of resentment. He stayed the night in a small hotel near Leicester Square, and in the morning took a taxi to Liverpool Street.

There was a train to King's Lynn at midday. He had time to go to a barber and have a haircut and shave before he bought a ticket and wandered up the platform. He climbed into a half-empty train and found a seat at leisure. The upholstery of the Great Eastern Railway was plush and clean. He sank into a corner seat and took out a book. The train jerked and clanked its way slowly out of the station, then began to gather speed as it left the low, grimed terraces of northeast London behind. Stephen found he could not concentrate on the book. His head seemed too clogged and numb for him to be able to follow the simple narrative. Although there was some stiffness in his limbs he did not feel the ache of fatigue in any physical way; he had slept reasonably well in his small hotel room and breakfasted late. His mind, however, seemed hardly to function at all. He was capable of doing little more than sitting and staring at the landscape that went by. The fields were lit by a spring sun. The occasional narrow stream or river went quietly through them. On the rise of hills he could once or twice make out the grey spires of churches, or a cl.u.s.ter of farm buildings, but for the most part he saw only this flat, agricultural land, apparently uninhabited, whose deep, damp soil was going through the same minute rotations of growth and decay, invisible but relentless, that it had done for centuries beneath the cold, wet sky by day, by night, with no one to see.

Yet as the train clattered onward it seemed to sound a rhythm in a remote part of his memory. He dozed in the corner seat and awoke with a start, having dreamed he was in the Lincolnshire village of his childhood. Then he found he was still asleep: he had only dreamed that he had awoken. Again he found himself in a barn in a flat, pale field, with a train going by. A second time he awoke, in some fear, and tried to keep himself conscious; but again he found that he had only dreamed his awakening.

Each time his eyes opened he tried to stand up, to lever himself off the plush seat of the carriage, but his limbs were too heavy and he felt himself slide under again, just as he had once seen a man in his company slip on the duckboards of the trench into an uncovered sumphole, where he had drowned in the clinging yellow mud.

At last he managed to catch himself in a moment of waking and force his legs up. He stood at the window and gazed at the fields.

It took some minutes before he could convince himself that he was not dreaming. The sensation felt no different, to begin with, from the half-dozen times he had thought himself awake, only then to find that he was still asleep and had dreamed it.

Gradually some clarity returned to him. He held tight to the frame of the window and breathed deeply. The sense of disorientation diminished. I am tired, he thought, as he pulled a cigarette from its case. I am tired in my body and in my mind, as Gray pointed out. Perhaps Gray, or one of his Austrian doctors, could also explain the curious sequence of hallucinating dreams. He straightened out his uniform and pushed his hair into place where he had ruffled it in sleep. Pulling back the door of the compartment, he wove his way down the swaying carriage to the restaurant car. Only two tables were taken and he was able to seat himself by the window. The steward waddled down the aisle with a menu.

Stephen was surprised by the choice. It had been years since he had been confronted with such variety. He asked for consomme, then sole, and steak-andkidney pudding. The waiter offered him the wine list. His pocket was filled with English bank notes he had bought with his pay in Folkestone. He ordered the most expensive wine on the list, which was six shillings a bottle.

The steward hovered with a ladle full of boiling soup, most of which he deposited into the crested plate, though by the time he had finished, the starched white cloth bore a long trail of brown. Stephen found the soup too strong to be pleasant; the taste of fresh beef stock and seasoning confused him. He had not eaten lunch or dinner in Amiens and his palate had grown used to Tickler's plumand-apple pudding, bully beef, and biscuits, with only an occasional slice of cake sent out from England to Gray or Weir.

The little fillets of sole with the delicate film of veins and intricate white layering of flesh were too subtle for him to taste. With some ceremony the steward then poured an inch of wine into the crystal gla.s.s. Stephen swallowed quickly and told him to pour. While he waited for the steak-and-kidney pudding, he drank properly. He found the taste overpowering. It was as though his whole head had been filled with small explosions of scent and colour. He had not tasted wine for six months, and then only a rough, unlabelled white. He put the gla.s.s down quickly. Water at the front tasted simply of water if it had come up with the rations, or something worse if it had been sieved from sh.e.l.lholes; tea had an equally straightforward flavour--of petrol, from the cans in which it was carried. But when he drank this wine it felt as though he were drinking some complex essence of France itself, not the visceral inferno of Picardy, but a pastoral, older place where there was still hope.

He was evidently even more tired than he had thought. He ate as much of the steak-and-kidney pudding as he could. He pa.s.sed over the dessert and smoked a cigarette with coffee. At King's Lynn he took a branch line along the Norfolk coast toward Sheringham, which he thought was the place Weir had recommended. However, he found as the small train puffed along that he was impatient with travelling. He wanted to be outside in the clear, peaceful air; he longed for an inn with a soft bed. At the next station, a village called Burnham Market, he hauled his valise down from the luggage rack and jumped out onto the platform. He was able to walk into the village itself, which was bisected by a road on either side of which was a plush, well-kept green. Most of the houses that overlooked it had been built in the eighteenth century; they were s.p.a.cious but modest and were interspersed with half a dozen shops, including a pharmacy, a chandler, and a place that sold equipment for horses.

Behind a huge chestnut tree was a long, low-built inn called The Blackbird. Stephen went into it and rang a bell on a counter at the foot of the stairs. No one answered, so he went into the stone-flagged bar. It was empty, though there were still uncollected beer gla.s.ses from lunchtime on the tables. It had a dark, cool atmosphere, given by the floor and the heavy wooden beams.

He heard a female voice behind him and turned to see a plump woman in an ap.r.o.n who smiled a little uncertainly as he met her eye. She told him she was only the cleaner and the landlord was out for the afternoon, but she could let him have a room if he would sign the register. She showed him upstairs to a small bedroom with a mahogany chest of drawers and an old wooden bedstead with a fat white eiderdown on it. There was one ladder-back chair by the door and a washstand with a china jug and basin. Just by the door was a small bookshelf with half a dozen wellread volumes on it. Beyond the chest was a window that overlooked the green at the front of the hotel where the chestnut tree's white blossom blocked out the sky. Stephen thanked the woman and threw his valise on to the bed. It was the kind of room he had wanted.

When he had unpacked he lay down on the bed and closed his eyes. He wanted to sleep, but his eyelids were flickering too much. Each time sleep seemed near his body jolted him back from it. Eventually he fell into a half-waking state, like the one he had found himself in on the train, in which brightly illuminated scenes from the last two or three years occurred at random in his mind. Incidents and men he had forgotten recurred with vivid immediacy, and then were gone. He tried to pull himself back from the lurid sequence of memories. He kept seeing Douglas falling off the stretcher on to the slippery floor of the trench as a sh.e.l.l landed; he could hear the lifeless thump of his pa.s.sive body. A man he had forgotten, called Studd, came back to his mind, his helmet blown back and his scalp raked by machine-gun bullets as he bent to help another man who had fallen.

Stephen climbed off the bed. His hands were shaking like Michael Weir's during a bombardment. He breathed in deeply, hearing the air catch in his chest. It seemed to him extraordinary that he should be feeling the shock now, when he was safe in a tranquil English village.

The thought of his surroundings stirred him. It was a_ _long time since he had been in England. Perhaps it would be good for him to walk outside and look at it. His boots echoed on the uncarpeted wooden steps as he went down, hatless, into the hall and out into the air.

He heaved his shoulders up, then let them drop in a long, broken sigh. He began to walk along the green, then turned down a lane that led away from the village. He tried to relax himself. I have been under fire, he thought; but now, for the time being, it is over. Under fire. The words came back. How thin and inadequate the phrase was.

The hedgerows were deep and ragged where he walked, covered with the lace of cow parsley. The air had a feeling of purity, as though it had never been breathed; it was just starting to be cool with the first breeze of evening. From the tall elms he could see at the end of the field there was a sound of rooks, and a gentler calling of wood pigeons close at hand. He stopped, and leaned against a gate. The quietness of the world about him seemed to stand outside time; there was no human voice to place it.

Above him he saw the white moon, early and low above the elms. Over and behind it were long jagged wisps of cloud that ran in ribbed lines back into the pale blue of the sky, then trailed away in gestures of vapourous white.

Stephen felt himself overtaken by a climactic surge of feeling. It frightened him because he thought it would have some physical issue, in spasm or bleeding or death. Then he saw that what he felt was not an a.s.sault but a pa.s.sionate affinity. It was for the rough field running down to the trees and for the path going back into the village, where he could see the tower of the church: these and the forgiving distance of the sky were not separate, but part of one creation, and he too, still by any sane judgment a young man, by the repeated tiny pulsing of his blood, was one with them. He looked up and saw the sky as it would be trailed with stars under darkness, the crawling nebulae and smudged lights of infinite distance: these were not different worlds, it seemed now clear to him, but bound through the mind of creation to the shredded white clouds, the unbreathed air of May, to the soil that lay beneath the damp gra.s.s at his feet. He held tightly on to the stile and laid his head on his arms, in some residual fear that the force of binding love he felt would sweep him from the earth. He wanted to stretch out his arms and enfold in them the fields, the sky, the elms with their sounding birds; he wanted to hold them with the unending forgiveness of a father to his prodigal, errant, but beloved son. Isabelle and the cruel dead of the war; his lost mother, his friend Weir: nothing was immoral or beyond redemption, all could be brought together, understood in the long perspective of forgiveness. As he clung to the wood, he wanted also to be forgiven for all he had done; he longed for the unity of the world's creation to melt his sins and anger, because his soul was joined to it. His body shook with the pa.s.sion of the love that had found him, from which he had been exiled in the blood and the flesh of long killing.

He lifted his head, and found that he was smiling. He walked in peace along the road for perhaps an hour, though he had no track of time. The evening stayed light as far as he went, the fields in their different shades and the trees in lines or clumps or alone where a chance seed had dropped.

As the road fell and turned a corner he found himself coming into a small village. There were two boys playing on a big green s.p.a.ce beyond a ditch that separated it from the road. Stephen went into a pub opposite and found himself in what looked like a private parlour. An irritable old man asked him what he wanted. He fetched beer from an unseen barrel in a back room; with the pint mug he brought a smaller gla.s.s containing some cinnamon drink. Stephen took both gla.s.ses outside and sat on a bench by the green, watching the boys at play until the sun at last went down and the white moon glowed.

Stephen went back a day early to France so that he could visit Jeanne in Amiens. His transfer to brigade staff had been delayed by a fortnight, and he was to rejoin his company at the Front in the meantime. He thought the return to the war might be made easier if he had spent a night in France before going on to whatever billet Gray had meanwhile allocated him.

Amiens station had the look of an old landmark to him, though he found to his surprise when he counted that this was only the third time he had actually arrived at it. The first time had led to extraordinary and unseen consequences and so, in a way, had the second. On this occasion there would certainly be no Isabelle; perhaps there would be no drama or reverse at all. He hoped so.

Jeanne had decided to trust him, and he felt grateful to her. There was no need for it, but it showed generosity and imagination on her part, he thought, unless it was only pity. He found it difficult to know what kind of feelings he awakened in people now, but even if Jeanne's impulse was merely one of charity to an uncouth soldier, he would not turn it away. She was a kind woman. He wondered why she had not been married: she must be thirty-eight or -nine, almost too old to have children.

He had sent a telegram from Boulogne, and had awaited her reply. She would be happy to see him that evening, she said, at any time.

He walked up through the town, still with his awkward service valise. He was wearing one of the new shirts he had bought in London, with new underwear. As far as he could tell, the lice that had plagued him had perished in the bonfire he had made with his old clothes in Norfolk. As he pa.s.sed through Liverpool Street on his return, he asked the barber to remove his moustache. He had begun to feel almost like the young man who had arrived at the boulevard du Gange.

He crossed the square with the cafe in which he had met Jeanne and came to the small house in which she had been lodging with Isabelle. He rang the bell. As he waited he tried to remember what Jeanne looked like, but no picture came to his mind.

"Corne in, Monsieur." Jeanne held out her hand.

Stephen found himself once more in the modest hallway, though it seemed more brightly lit this time. Jeanne opened a door on the right into a sitting room. It had a shiny wooden floor and a circular table with freesias in a gla.s.s bowl. There were armchairs on either side of the marble mantelpiece.

"Are you tired after your journey?"

"No, not at all. I feel very well."

Stephen sat in the chair that Jeanne indicated for him, and looked up at her. He did remember the strong features of her face and her pale skin; when he looked at them they made him calm. In the set of her eyes and the turn of her head there were occasional flickers of Isabelle, something impetuous that was transformed and stilled in the gravity of Jeanne's demeanour.

Jeanne said, "She told me you stared a lot."

Stephen apologized. "These years in the mud--I've lost my manners." He was glad that the subject of Isabelle had come up so soon. At least they could then dispose of it.

"Have you heard from Isabelle?"

"Yes," said Jeanne. "She's very happy. Max is badly hurt, but he's going to survive. She asked me to thank you for coming to see her. I think it meant a good deal to her. She has been very unlucky--or very foolish, as my father would say. All her decisions have been difficult ones. To see you again and to know that you at least wished her well, I think that sustained her."

"I'm pleased," said Stephen, though he did not feel pleasure. It confused him to think the role he now played in Isabelle's life was to offer minor rea.s.surance. "I'm pleased," he repeated, and in that moment of small insincerity he thought he felt the last presence of Isabelle leave him, not by going into false oblivion, as she had the first time, but into simple absence.

He turned to Jeanne. "How long will you stay in Amiens? Isn't your home in Rouen?"

Jeanne looked down at her hands. "My father's old and would like me to stay and look after him. Although my mother's still alive, she's not well and is less attentive than he would like."

"So you will go back?"

"I don't know," said Jeanne. "I've been a dutiful daughter. But I'm drawn to the idea of independence. I like it here in Amiens, in this little house."

"Of course." Stephen thought of her age again. "What about your other sisters? Couldn't they look after him?"

"No. They're all married. Now, Monsieur, we're going to have dinner in about an hour. I'll have to go and see how it's coming along. I'm not sure if you'd like to rest, or have some aperitif... I'm not used to this sort of thing." She waved her hand.

"It's somewhat unconventional."

"Nothing in the world is conventional at the moment." Stephen smiled. "I'm grateful that you understand that. In the meantime, yes. I'll have a drink." Jeanne smiled back at him. It was the first time he had seen her smile, and he believed it was the most extraordinary expression he had seen on a human face. It began with a slow widening of the lips, then the pale skin of her face became radiant, not with blood as Isabelle's might have done, but with an inner light that made it shine. At last it reached her eyes, which developed squares of brilliance as they narrowed into trusting humour. It was not just her expression, Stephen thought, but her whole face that had changed into something forgiving and serene. She said, "There is something Isabelle sent me out to buy when you came before. It smells horrible. It's called Old Orkney. It's an English drink." Stephen laughed. "Scottish, I think. I know it well."

Jeanne brought the bottle and jug of water. Stephen poured a little into a small crystal gla.s.s and looked around the room while Jeanne went to the kitchen. He could hear the sound of pans and cutlery; a smell of herbs and wine caused a sudden rush of hunger in his stomach. He lit a_ _cigarette and searched the elegant little room for an ashtray. There were a number of small ceramic and china dishes, but he dared not risk them and flicked the ash into the fireplace where he rubbed it in with his foot. For all his new lice-free clothes, he felt lumpish and awkward in this tidy, feminine room. He wondered if he would ever refind his ease and naturalness in normal surroundings, or whether he had now evolved into a creature whose natural habitat included corrugated iron ceilings, wooden walls, and food hanging in rat-proof parcels from the rafters.

Jeanne had made soup that she served from a bowl on a table at the end of the room. It was supposed to be a fish soup in the manner of Dieppe, near her home in Normandy, she explained, but she had not been able to find all the ingredients she needed in Amiens. Stephen remembered how irritated Isabelle had once been when he said that Amiens was not noted for its cuisine.

"I expect the war has affected supplies," he said.

"I'm not sure," said Jeanne. "It may be that the Amienois are just not interested in food. Would you like to pour the wine? I don't know if it's good, but it's one I've seen my father drink."

Stephen was still not sure whether Jeanne viewed him as a refugee whom someone public-spirited should foster, or if she had simpler motives of friendship. He questioned her as they ate.

She was not generous with information. Her manner had a pleasant shyness about it, as though she felt that the evening was not really permitted by the rules of etiquette and at any moment someone might come in and forbid it to continue. Stephen gathered that she had been kept at home by a sense of duty to her father, who seemed able to impose his will on her as he had on Isabelle. She had resisted his choice of husband more successfully than her younger sister, but he had retaliated by forbidding hers. As he had scared away Isabelle's soldier, so he had frozen from contention a widowed man who would have taken Jeanne away from him.

Jeanne spoke in very measured sentences; there was something strict in her manner that was relieved by the humour that glimmered behind it in her eyes and in the sudden movements of her long, thin fingers.

Stephen continued to feel a sense of tranquillity in her presence. He found himself happy to listen to her talking, and when she questioned him he was able to reply with a sense of proportion, even when talking about the war.

Then, as it grew late, he began to feel the dread of his return. From the first time as a child when he had been taken from the fields and made to go back to the inst.i.tution in which he was living, he had feared the moment of separation more than anything: it was abandonment. The return to the trenches was something he could not bring himself to contemplate. As the time grew nearer he lost the ability to talk any more.

Jeanne said, "You're thinking of your return, aren't you? You've stopped answering my questions."

Stephen nodded.

"It won't last for ever. We are waiting for tanks and for the Americans, that's what Marshal Petain says. We must all be patient. Think of your next leave."

"Can I come here again?"

"Yes, if you like. Count the days and the weeks. Keep yourself safe. It sounds as though with your new job you won't be in action so much. Be careful." Stephen said, "You may be right." He sighed. "But it's been so long, so very long. I think of the men I was with and--"

"Then you must stop thinking about them, the ones who have died. You did your best for them and there's nothing more you can do. When it's over you can remember them. Now you must concentrate on getting yourself through it. Another casualty won't help those who have died."

"I can't do it, Jeanne, I can t do it. I'm so tired."

Jeanne looked at his pleading face. He was close to tears.

"I have given everything," he said. "Don't make me go on. Please let me stay here."

Jeanne's smile came again. "This is not the talk of a man who led his soldiers on the Ancre. A few weeks behind the lines, where there's no danger. You can manage that."

"It isn't the danger. It's the effort. I can no longer bring my mind to it."