Touchstone (14 page)

Chapter Twenty

B
ENNETT
G
REY STOOD IN THE DOORWAY
of his whitewashed cottage. When the motorcar’s black roof-top had disappeared behind the walls, when the engine noise started to fade, the shakes began. His bones felt oddly liquid. He wanted to scream, to weep, to pound his fist against the wall until it left bloodstains, to swallow the entire bottle waiting on the kitchen table and poison himself into a coma. He wanted to grab his shotgun and gallop across the two fields to the lane’s dog-leg and, when the bugger slowed for the sharp turn, to vault the stone wall and ram the shotgun barrel through the window and pull both triggers, taking the driver’s smooth head right off his shoulders.

And if that American got in the way, well, too bad. Too
fucking
bad.

Or, he could put his own head in front of the gun’s double barrels. Ah, death, constant companion and seductress, the faithful whore, singing her Siren song, that endless melody that lay beneath every hour of his life here.

Not today, my love, you sweet-tongued bitch. Or not yet today.

When the Major had come up the drive shortly after four o’clock, Robbie close behind with the silver watch in his hand, Grey and Stuyvesant were already outside. Grey had put up a hand to stop the intruder.

“Mr. Stuyvesant and I have settled things,” he’d called across the yard. “I’m willing to work with him on this: Not you, him. If that is not acceptable, just say the word, and I’ll write my sister a letter warning her off her friends.”

The Major did not like it, not one bit. However, having brought the American into it, he couldn’t very well pull him away. In the end, he nodded and tossed his hat into the motor, followed by the black overcoat.

But instead of getting in behind the wheel, the son of a bitch had stood and looked at him over the roof of the car, peeling off his black leather gloves as he did so. He had then walked around the car’s bonnet, into full view of the householder, and opened his flies to piss, long and hard, across the rain-damp stones of the wall.

Precisely where Grey’s eyes were guaranteed to hit, every time he came out of his front door.

A place he couldn’t help walking past a dozen times a day.

Utterly childish, to piss on another man’s wall. And yet calculated to be absolutely enraging. Even Robbie knew it was wrong; although it was raining by then, he’d indignantly hauled a bucket of water to slosh across the spot as soon as the sounds of the engine faded.

Water wouldn’t erase that stain; it might as well have been acidetched into the stones. Grey’s impulse was to hitch his neighbor’s horse to the wall and drag it to the sea.

“Bennett, art a ailish?”

“I’m fine, Robbie. I need you to go home now.”

“Thee duzzen look foin. Ah’ll go fetch Motherr. Her’ll bring ee med’cin—”

“Robbie,” he said, his voice wavering with the effort of control, “I have to be alone. If you don’t go home, I shall have to shout at you. Go home. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

Shouting was the ultimate threat to the simple lad, since it reduced him to quivering tears and made him wet his trousers. Grey peeled his taut fingers off the creaking wood of the door-frame and shut the door, firmly but without violence. Inside and alone, he stood with his eyes closed, body swaying with the effort it took not to pound his fist—or his skull—against the wallpaper.

Aldous Carstairs. Jesus Christ, the Major was back in his life. One sight of those eyes and Grey’s entire carefully constructed world had tumbled to ruin like a child’s block tower.

You’re five years older and a hell of a lot more settled in yourself, he berated himself; he has no control over you.

But Jesus, the Major with his gloves and his wires and sliding out his note-book and his
questions,
Christ, the questions that just wouldn’t stop—

Have a drink, one drink, make yourself move, you don’t have to see the Major, just that Stuyvesant fellow, you can get along well enough with him.

Yes but the
questions
…

And the Major had a plan, some dark scheme taking shape in the back of that twisted mind, he could see it in the flash of the man’s eyes, hear it in the play of his voice: The man might as well have spoken it aloud:
Don’t worry, Captain Grey, I will be back for you.

Oh, Sarah, my dearest sister, what has your impetuous nature got us into? Don’t you know what this means?

A thousand pinpricks of sensation plucked at his skin: the drift of air and the sound of the neighbor’s rooster and Robbie’s dejected footsteps, in retreat across the gravel. The growl of the Major’s motor, the lingering traces of his smell on Grey’s clothing, the disturbance the American left in the house, plucking and worrying at him until he felt a shriek rise in his throat like vomit.

In the end, Grey gave in and limped through the cottage to the bedroom. He banged the shutters closed (
the creak of the hinges, the smell of the dust that rose from them
) and went to the room’s back corner (
hair/a mouse dropping/ a tiny stone from the drive/a curl of dry leaf with the smell of verbena
) and for the first time in months, forced his bad leg to kneel onto the cool stone floor (
grit and the cutter’s blade and the eternal smell of stone
). He folded himself up, inching forward until his skull was jammed into the meeting point of walls and floor. It made him feel like a damned ostrich, or an infant in a cold and unyielding womb, but when the world around him went overly bright and threatened to break over his head, the only thing that helped was to put himself into this pathetic, vulnerable, useless position. It was dark, it was solid, he was alone. It was the embodiment of abject surrender, a complete relinquishing of the iron control that kept him alive.

Being trapped allowed his ragged breath to slow. Gradually, the sweat dried; eventually, the frantic
lubdub lubdub
of his heart grew quieter. Sensation retreated; thoughts became ordered; the ritual of memory began.

The whistle against his lips tasted of brass, cold and raw. His dry tongue tried to moisten it and settle it into place. Lungs filled, lips pursed, then breath, pushing out against the sour metal taste: one blow against the mouthpiece to bring the company to readiness; the second breath to send the ladders slapping up against the sandbags; the third would trigger motion, all his men, his trusting and responsive brothers, summoning their muscles against the gut-clenching, balls-withering knowledge that once they had climbed the rungs and cleared the parapet, run and dived to earth and settled their guns to their shoulders, there they would be, out in the open, with nothing but the air to shield them from German bullets.

The whistle against his lips tasted of brass.

He licked the whistle and wrapped his mouth around it. The men jostled at the base of the ladders—a last furtive drag on a cigarette, hands reaching to check on chinstraps, shoulders shifting, one of Hamilton’s crude tension-jokes, some coughing. He drew breath deep into his lungs, and then suddenly, strangely, the earth shifted. He staggered, the whistle jerking loose on the lanyard around his neck. Belatedly, the sound reached him: incoming shell, followed by the compressive noise of a small building hitting the ground. His men shouted silently, all those beloved faces twisting in fear as they scrambled away, slow and urgent—down the trench, over the top, anywhere that was not
there.
Bullets began to
zip
overhead, where the sky was, and then Bennett Grey’s world screamed.

That was what it felt like, then and ever afterwards: like standing before the mouth of the world when it came open to shriek out its agony and outrage and bewilderment. The nerve-shattering noise drove straight through him, permeating muscle and bone in a wave too enormous to begin to comprehend. He only knew it by its opening blast and by the fact that it changed every cell in his body, twisting each and every one of those millions of tiny blocks of life, reversing the flow of blood through his veins and making his very bones momentarily soft and malleable; when the scream ended, every drop of him—from the hairs on his forearms to the whorls on his fingers to the building-block tower of vertebrae up his spinal column—had…
altered,
in some slight but unmistakable way. As though the essence of Bennett Grey had been decanted and then poured back into someone else’s subtly different form.

It was an artillery shell, they told him later. It had plowed deep into the near-liquid floor of the rain-soaked trench, paused a moment, and exploded. Had it gone off two seconds earlier, the shell would have scattered pieces of him over a wide patch of no-man’s-land, hammering bits of bloody flesh into the trench walls, twisting his rifle into uselessness, launching his helmet in the direction of Paris.

Instead, it erupted at his very feet, flipping him right out of the trench like some circus act and burying him in the muck.

When Bennett began to trickle into his new body, his first slow awareness was the absence of sound. Such a blessing, silence, after that incredible shudder of a scream that had lasted for the snap of a finger, or for a fortnight. But when the mouth of the world finally closed, in the wake of thundering cacophony came peace and the sweet tranquillity of innocence. The body that he was slowly coming to fill seemed a place of comfort and quiet; the surface on which it rested was soft as a feather bed; the sky above was a calm, unassuming, undemanding canopy of pale gray, like the breast of a nesting dove.

He lay, nestled like a baby into the pitted ground, watching the sky out of his left eye. A crow flew across the canopy, and some time later, another. Thoughts flitted across the expanse of his mind in much the same manner. He was a child atop a grass-covered hill on a summer’s day; in a few minutes, he would let it all go. He would tip and roll and launch himself down the fragrant close-cropped greenness, a laughing, dizzy-making tumble down the long hill of summer to the cool, clear, sweet stream that lay at the bottom. The world was a good place, with no rough edges—not even any stones protruding from the turf—just warm and comforting and delicious and always new.

Except that he had to breathe. Truly, if he’d had a choice he would just have lay there, motionless until the night fell and darkness took him. But his new body grew uncomfortable, then insistent, and when the final measure of his spirit had dribbled into this borrowed flesh, the impulse for air was triggered. His lungs began to work, and in an instant, like an infant ripped from snug warmth and slapped into autonomy, the world slapped Bennett from his dream: The summer’s afternoon exploded into a cold, stinking, terrifying maelstrom.

He still couldn’t hear a thing, but he knew where he was, and it wasn’t any summer’s hillside. He was hurt—the body he was in wouldn’t tell him just how badly, but it was bad—and he was both exposed and hidden, somewhere behind the British wire. His ears were filled with a thick nothingness. Maybe they were just clotted with mud? He could try to clear them, but that would mean he’d have to move: Lying still, he’d look like a dead body, which meant Jerry wouldn’t bother shooting at him. It would also mean that his own men wouldn’t make an effort to retrieve him until dark.

By which time it would be too late for Bennett Grey.

He eased his head an inch to one side, tiny, jerky, unfamiliar motions, muscles he’d never worked before. Dark mud came into view at the corner of his vision; he could feel it oozing up his cheek as his face settled into the muck. He could see no movement, feel only the thud of guns through the fragile gauze that was his skin—not too close, those guns: down the line a little.

He began to raise his head to look around him, but stopped when some inner voice warned him it would hurt. Instead, he began to wriggle his right side and elbow more deeply into the soupy ground, easing his left side up into view.

He was buried.

A little bit more, and the mud would have closed over him before he’d regained consciousness, allowing him to drift away into that summer’s afternoon. Instead, he lay locked in a tormented body under the clammy entombing soil, his face staring out of a pit that was visibly growing narrower as the muck settled.

Would it be so bad, he wondered? Just close your eyes for a minute and it’ll be over, and you can have the roll down the turf to the stream, forever and ever, amen. No more orders, received or—worse—given. No taste of brass whistles on the lips. No more letters to a dead soldier’s parents. Twenty-nine months of horror, filth, and disgust is enough. Let go.

But to his exasperation, this unfamiliar body did not want to give itself over to the mud. With the unthinking instincts of a new-born colt, his head twisted, his shoulders rotated, weak struggles against the weight of France. Both arms worked to reach the air, fingernails clawed up the buttons of his uniform, scrabbling against this
thing
that wanted, gentle and patient, to pull him into the earth. Finally, his left hand was at his chin and pushing, then his right joined it, and they thrust in unison.

A soft boulder lay half across him. The thing was soft like the mud but with marginally more substance; pushing an elbow against it only shoved Bennett more firmly into the welcoming embrace of the soil.

Then his elbow broke into the boulder’s spongy wetness, and the smell (so
that
was where Walters had gone) of the trenches washed into his lungs.

Bennett himself was well familiar with corpses buried without benefit of clergy, soldiers and parts of soldiers long tidied away by explosions and collapsing trenches, unceremoniously brought to light by later shells, newer trenches. The stink of them coated the throat and, even after months of familiarity, brought a gag in the guts, but once they had been cleared away or re-buried, the proximity of a rotting foot or half-exposed skull had long since ceased to disturb his meals.

However, this new body of his had never met such a thing before, and at such close quarters, it panicked. With little half-screams of horror it pushed at the
thing,
which only made matters worse. He squirmed madly, desperately, to one side, deeper into the mud, he didn’t care, just so it took him out from under it. He was aware that one of his legs violently protested any movement at all, and that his gut muscles threatened to spill out the same way this poor bastard’s rotted guts were spilling all over Bennett’s face and arms, but he couldn’t help it, he only wanted to be away,
away,
God get me away from this.