‘And it doesn’t frighten you?’
‘No. It’s unfamiliar, so fear can’t get a look-in. All I can do is thank God I’m alive, and enjoy it.’
They drank champagne at supper. ‘We’re not far from Reims,’ he told her. ‘When a German brigade had to pull out of the town in 1914 every man had two bottles in his knapsack. But we’ll drink to us, not robbery.’
She had never felt so deeply imprisoned in herself, packed hard into her limits by her own choice. It was a freedom she had often dreamed of, and wondered whether she could live with. If the spirit died, it would live again. Everything mattered. Her finger ends ached when they met against his limits. She liked it in her own prison, she told herself as he undressed her while she lay on the outer covers of the bed, taking the walls of prison within prison away. She wondered why she liked the prison of herself so much, why she preferred it here, and in fact whether she finally did or would for long. To be a prisoner meant that everything was so much clearer beyond the barred window. She could see it, but not yet get out.
Her clothes came off, and she couldn’t move, dead yet able to feel what he was doing, unable to look at him, and then spread out naked: I’m a respectable woman, and saying, ‘Fuck me!’ even while rage against having her unrelenting modesty violated went through her, and he organized her orgasm while any feeling at all was still with her and she felt that, as she came in a way that pierced her with both pain and pleasure, she was not any more or by any means a respectable woman, and hoped she never would be on feeling the implosion of his life discharging into her.
3
He moved her shoulder gently to and fro, and kissed her mouth. He was washed and dressed, spruced up in his jacket and open-necked shirt. She fought to focus, so that details of the room would become clear. Through her sweat she smelled his aftershave.
‘Time to get out of bed, my love.’
There was a knock at the door, and she pulled the sheet to her breasts. A maid came in with breakfast, and set the tray down, then gave a single accusing sniff (or so it seemed) and went out.
She wanted to shrink into the bed. ‘I’ve never felt so wrecked. Can I stay in oblivion for a week? Then I might recover.’
He smiled. ‘You look younger. Travelling agrees with you.’
She moaned, and wondered why he was so blind. She felt ninety. ‘For how long, though?’
He broke a croissant, and put a piece to her lips.
‘You’re spoiling me!’
‘Don’t you like it?’
‘When you do it, I do.’ He was right. The world’s weight had fallen away. She sat on the side of the bed and looked for her nightdress. It was on the back of a chair, across the room. He ate hungrily, but paused to give her more coffee, pouring whisky from a leather-covered flask into both cups. ‘There’s nothing better for starting the day.’
Her underwear was on the floor, but she didn’t care. He picked it up and laid it on the bed, as if she ought to. But she liked it here. She was no longer respectable, and wanted to stay for weeks. ‘I wonder how Judy and the kids are managing?’
‘Well enough for us not to worry. While you’re having your bath, I’ll be downstairs paying our reckoning. Then I’ll nip along the street to visit a flower shop.’
4
The large-scale map, with burial grounds marked in green ink, had been specially produced from a War Office original by the War Graves Commission to illustrate the position of cemeteries in the Arras area. Percy had had it dissected and mounted on cloth, and folded into a leather case, with a flap which closed and buttoned over the front, and his initials embossed in gold lettering under the clasp.
Tom drove out of the valley of the Scarpe, and on to a minor road through Roclincourt towards Vimy and the Ridge. There was open land all round, and burial plots appearing by the roadside like allotments on well-fertilized soil sprouting their rows of headstones. She navigated him beyond the village and down a lane till they saw the green nameplate of the one they were searching for on a wall. He stopped on a gravel forecourt and switched off the ignition. ‘I’ll go in for a few minutes and find my uncle’s headstone. Do you want to come?’
She would, even if only to exercise her legs. He took the bouquet of lilies and carnations from the back seat. Such a notion of respect was an attempt to bring someone he had never known back to reality and place him squarely in a life they had never had together. At the same time, everything he did – she thought – seemed as if it would be the last action of its kind, a finality in each unfolding scheme, which made her feel unbearably sad, and protectively tender towards him. That he could be more vulnerable than she had ever been came as a shock, but that too helped to make their life together possible. She preferred not to ask what his plans were, wanting the childish satisfaction as each intention was revealed in action. She liked to indulge in the pleasure of receiving surprises, yet knew she had constructed these deceptions in order not to worry him with the desires in him which were so deep and personal that to bring them too abruptly into the open would cause him grief. Out of love she had manoeuvred this consideration of equals, assuming he would always do the same for her, since in so many ways he already had.
They walked between hundreds of headstones, some worn or slightly mildewed, but all in perfect alignment, the gravel neat, the grass clipped, not a weed to be seen. Most had crosses embossed, many had names, but scores were also nameless and bore the words KNOWN ONLY UNTO GOD. After sixty years they were cared for, perhaps still remembered in the families from which they had come.
He went a few yards in front with flowers held low. She was weeping with pity and a wracking pain, with terror and helplessness, sorrow and chagrin. She stopped. It was too much, this lake of graves. She hoped he would not see or hear, the wind turning her skin cold from tears that flowed on to her coat.
She rocked uncontrollably to and fro, with more despair than she had ever felt or given vent to, as if the collective spirit of so many dead were tearing out the life that so far had only raged uselessly in her. She couldn’t stop, but walked towards him.
He looked at the grave of Captain Phillips, Royal Engineers. Not under a cross, but the Jewish Star of David that his bereaved mother had arranged to be put there. A British soldier of the Star of David, he said. An officer and a gentleman in Jewry’s Book of Honour.
She held his arm while he talked. There were Jewish soldiers in the German Army too, he went on, Jews on either side doing their duty, and no doubt it happened that a bullet from one would find the heart of another. In the last war all Jews were on our side, except those who were caught and murdered by the Germans before they could be.