They sit there watching the fresh batch of pine cones Adeline has thrown on the fire go up in smoke, and Audrey muses, Are we parties to the same eldritch vision? A Zeppelin downed by the guns that subsides, all its fiery cathedral of buttresses, arches and beams burning in the night sky — then: the dull ashy corpse of it scattered across the furrows of an Essex field, the ruination of flight — Icarus, raped and defiled for the readers of the much attenuated pages of the picture papers . .I have, Adeline says, one or two of the models that he made — of flying machines. Willie wants very desperately to play with them but I shan’t allow it. I have these too. She rises abruptly, crosses her candlelit tomb. Opening the lid of a writing case, she withdraws a package of postcards tied up with black ribbons like her hair that he loosed. Audrey knows what they are — she does not bother to feign interest when Adeline unties the bundle and passes them across, only flips through them as she might a novelty flicker book, engineering not movement but this stasis: I-am, I-am, I-am, I-am — for what Stanley Death had done with these Field Service postcards was the same as he had with those sent to his sister, and doubtless to Samuel and Mary Jane Deer as well. Whereas the authorities had enjoined the writer to cross out one phrase or the other to create the semblance of a missive, Stanley had scored them all through except for this essential declaration: I am
quite well, I have been admitted to the hospital sick/wounded, and am going on well/and hope to be discharged soon, I am being sent down to the base, I have received your letter dated/telegram/parcel, Letter follows at first opportunity, I have received no letter from you lately/for a long time. The command Signature Only had been deleted as well, as had the stentorian If You Make Any Other Mark on this Card it will be Destroyed. When Audrey received the first of many such as these, she had wondered at the response of the military censor to her brother’s furious effacements of all but the fact of his existence. Packet after packet full of men dispatched across the Channel, wave upon wave of them sent over the top, bag after bag of these pathetic cards posted back to Blighty, it was all, surely, a product of the same narrow-mindedness: no order had been disobeyed, so Stanley’s cards might be passed. Or perhaps the censor — who Audrey envisaged sat in a safe bureau, miles from the Front, beside a warm stove, a glass of something to hand and a Froggy doxy too — was amused by initialling these crazy ragtime communiqués, so scrawled PFL — it was always the same man — laughingly. I-am, I-am, I-am, — two I-ams per card, scores of them sent to her, to Adeline — and no other words from him in the ten interminably lengthening months since he had returned to France. I-am, I-am, I-am — a magic spell, chanted by a terrified child in the drained-out nothingness before dawn, I-am, I-am, I-am — Audrey sighs dispiritedly, aware suddenly of her own flickering existence and deathly fatigue. They both know that only one product derives from these formulae: that. . he is not. — You don’t imagine —. Adeline cannot continue. She tries again: They say missing and presumed. . so you don’t think —. And once more fails. Neither of them is a believer — in Jesus or Pan.