— They were always afraid we’d get trapped in the cellars.
— I suppose they flood, don’t they? At high tide?
Rivers climbed on to the path, trying to work out where the tide was and whether it was rising or falling, but he could hear only the crash of breaking waves and feel the drizzle of blown spume on his face. In spite of his mud-clogged boots and aching thighs, he started to run. As he neared the tower, a stronger blast of wind sent him staggering off the path. He was slithering and floundering through mud, calling Burns’s name, though the sound was snatched from his mouth and carried off into the whistling darkness.
He slid down on to the beach. An outgoing wave sucked shingle after it, but the entrance to the moat was clear. He hesitated, peering into the darkness, afraid that an unusually powerful wave might trap him in there. He called ‘David’, but he knew he couldn’t be heard and would have to go down, into the black darkness, if he were ever to find him.
He groped his way into the moat, steadying himself against the wall. It was so wet, so cold, so evil-smelling, that he thought perhaps the tide had already reached its height and was now falling. At first he could see nothing, but then the moon came out from behind a bank of cloud, and he saw Burns huddled against the moat wall. Rivers called ‘David’ and realized he was shouting when there was no need. Even the howl of the storm sounded subdued in the shelter of the moat. He touched Burns’s arm. He neither moved nor blinked. He was staring up at the tower, which gleamed white, like the bones of a skull.
‘Come on, David.’
His body felt like a stone. Rivers got hold of him and held him, coaxing, rocking. He looked up at the tower that loomed squat and menacing above them, and thought, Nothing justifies this. Nothing nothing nothing. Burns’s body remained rigid in his arms. Rivers was aware that if it came to a fight he might not win. Burns was terribly emaciated, but he was also thirty years younger. His surrender, when it came, was almost shocking. Suddenly his body had the rag-doll floppiness of the newborn. He collapsed against Rivers and started to shake, and from there it was possible to half lead, half push him out of the moat and up on to the relative safety of the path.
At the kitchen table, wrapped in a blanket, Burns said, ‘I couldn’t seem to get out of the dream. I woke up, I knew I was awake, I could move and yet… it was still there. My face was dripping. I could taste it.’ He tried to laugh. ‘And then the bloody maroon went off.’
There were no electric lights. The power lines must be down. They were talking by the light of an oil lamp that smoked and smelled, and left wisps of black smoke like question marks on the air.
‘I think we can do without this now,’ Rivers said, walking across to the window and pulling the curtains back. He opened the windows and shutters. The storm had almost blown itself out. A weak light seeped into the room, falling on Burns’s red eyes and exhausted face.
‘Why don’t you go to bed? I’ll bring you a hot-water bottle if you’ve got such a thing.’
Rivers saw him settled into bed. Then he went out to the butchers in the High Street, which he’d already noticed was surprisingly well stocked, bought bacon, sausages, kidneys, eggs, took them home and fried them. As he was spooning hot fat over the eggs, he remembered his reaction when he was looking up at the tower. Nothing can justify this, he’d thought. Nothing nothing nothing. He was rather glad not to be faced with the task of explaining that statement to Siegfried.
He sat down at the table and began to eat. He was still chasing the last dribble of egg yolk with a triangle of toast when Mrs Burril came in. She looked at the plates. ‘Cracked, did you?’ Two unpacked bags later she added, ‘Thought you might.’
‘Is the boat back?’
‘Not yet. I keep busy.’
Rivers went upstairs to check on Burns and found him still asleep. The room was full of books, stacked up on tables and chairs, spilling over on to the floor. Church architecture, country crafts, ornithology, botany and — a slight surprise — theology. He wondered whether this was an expression of faith, or a quest for faith, or simply an obsession with the absence of God.
One of the reasons the books had to be stacked on tables and chairs was that the bookcase was already full of other books: boys’ annuals, the adventure stories of Henty, Scouting for Boys. Games too: Ludo and Snakes and Ladders, a bat for beach cricket, collections of pebbles and shells, a strip of bladderwrack. All these things must have been brought here, or collected here, summer by summer, and then outgrown, but never thrown away, so that the room had become a sort of palimpsest of the young life it contained. He looked at Burns’s sleeping face, and then tiptoed downstairs.
The lifeboat came back later that morning. Rivers looked out of the living room window and saw it beached at the water’s edge, in that narrow space between the coils of tangled and rusting wire. He went out to watch.
The men were laying down the flat wooden skids over which the boat would be winched slowly back into place. A small group of villagers, mainly relatives of the crew, had gathered and were talking in low voices. The sea was choppy, but with none of the menace of the previous night. A light drizzle had begun to fall, matting the surface hairs on the men’s jerseys and woollen caps.
When he got back, he found Burns stirring, though not yet up.
‘Are they back?’ he asked.
‘Yes, they’re hauling her up now.’
Burns got out of bed and came across to the window. The drizzle had become a downpour. The lifeboat, now halfway up the beach, was obscured by sheets of smoking rain.
‘Be a load off Mrs Burril’s mind. She’s got two sons in the crew.’
‘Yes. She said.’
‘You mean she spoke?’
‘We had quite a chat. I didn’t know the lifeboat was such a family matter.’
‘Oh, yes. You see it on the memorial in the church. Not a good idea, really. From the woman’s point of view.’ A long pause. Then Burns added, ‘You get the same thing in a battalion. Brothers joining up together.’
Rivers went very still. This was the first time Burns had volunteered any information at all about France. Even in Craiglockhart, where he couldn’t altogether avoid talking about it, the bare facts of his war service had had to be prised out of him.
‘You know, you’ll be writing letters and suddenly you realize you’ve written the same name twice.’
Rivers said carefully, ‘That must be one of the worst jobs.’
‘You get used to it. I did it for eighty per cent of the company once.’
A long silence. Rivers was beginning to think he’d dried up, but then he said, ‘That was the day before the Somme. They got out there, and there was this bloody great dyke in the way. You couldn’t see it from the trench because there were bramble bushes round it. And it wasn’t on the map. Everybody bunched up, trying to get across it. German machine-gunners had a field day. And the few who did manage to get across were cut to pieces on the wire. General came round the following day. He said, “My God, did we really order men to attack across that?” Apparently we were intended to be a diversion from the main action. Further south.’
Slowly, Burns began to talk. He’d been promoted captain at the age of twenty-one, and this promotion coincided with the run-up to the Somme campaign. In addition to all the other strains, he’d been aware of a widespread, though unvoiced, opinion in the company that he was too young for the command, though in length of service he had been senior.