The boy hadn’t seen Leonard. He and his mates were on a stick-gathering mission, collecting sword-like lengths and carrying them to a particular boy by the calico tent who then inspected the offerings, admitting some and shaking his head ‘no’ to others. To Leonard’s adult eyes, there was nothing about that boy that marked him out as the leader. He was a little taller, perhaps, than the others, a bit older, maybe, but children had an instinctive ability to discern power.
Leonard got on well with children. With them there was none of the duplicity that adults relied upon to ease their way. They said what they meant and described what they saw and when they disagreed they fought and then made amends. He and Tom had been like that.
A tennis ball soared from nowhere, landing with a soft thud and rolling along the grass towards the river’s edge. Dog raced after it before trotting back to drop the gift at his master’s feet. Leonard accepted the sodden offering, weighing it in his palm briefly before hurling it back in the direction from which it had come.
There was some warmth in the sun now. He took off his shirt and trousers and, wearing only his trunks, made his way to the water’s edge. He dipped in a toe as a family of ducks drifted by.
Without giving himself time to change his mind, Leonard dived beneath the surface.
The early morning cold of the water made his skin tighten. He kept his eyes open as he swam down, down, down, as deep as he could go, reaching out when he met the bottom to clutch at the silt floor. He held on and started counting. Tom grinned back at him from within the clump of slippery reeds.
Leonard couldn’t remember a time before Tom. There’d only been thirteen months between them. Their mother had lost a child prior to Leonard, a girl called June who’d been stricken with scarlet fever in her second year, and she hadn’t been about to take the chance that she’d be left short again. He’d heard her confess to his aunt one afternoon over tea that she’d have had ten children if not for the ‘women’s problems’ that had stopped her.
‘You’ve an heir and a spare,’ the aunt had said with customary pragmatism, ‘and that’s better than naught.’
It had occupied Leonard on and off for years, wondering whether he was the ‘air’ and whether that was a good or a bad thing. His mother always hated it when the wind blew at night and rattled the windows in their frames.
Tom was the younger one, but he’d been more physical than Leonard. By the time they were five and four years old, Tom was the taller of the pair. He was broader, too, with strong shoulders – like a swimmer’s, their dad used to say with stilted masculine pride – and a charming character, open and easy, that drew people to him. Leonard, by contrast, was more internal. His mother liked to tell them that their personalities had been visible from the moment they were placed as newborns in her arms. ‘You pulled your little limbs tight against you and tucked your chin into your chest like you were trying to escape the world. Tom, though – he clenched his fists, jutted his chin and stuck out his bottom lip as if to say, “Come and get me!”’
Leonard’s lungs ached in his chest, but he remained submerged. He met his brother’s laughing gaze as a school of minnows swam between them. He kept counting.
Women liked Tom; they always had. He was handsome – even Leonard could see that – but it was something else. He had a way about him. He was funny, and generous, and when he laughed it was like the sky had cracked open and the sun was shining directly on your skin. Leonard, with plenty of time to reflect upon it since, had decided that it was an innate honesty that people responded to in Tom. Even when he was angry or fierce, there was a truthfulness to his emotion that drew people to him.
Leonard’s pulse was hammering hot in his ears now. It had expanded to fill his whole skull and he could stand it no longer. He pushed off the bottom and arrowed back through the water towards the glistening top, gasping sharply when he broke the surface. He squinted as the world turned briefly white and then rolled onto his back to catch his breath.
Leonard floated star-shaped, the sun pleasingly hot on his stomach. Ninety-three seconds. He was still well short of Tom’s record, snatched during the summer of 1913, but he would try again tomorrow. A lark was singing nearby and Leonard closed his eyes. Water lapped gently. The boys whooped gleefully in the distance, mad on summer.
Leonard swam slowly back to the bank. It was another day, just like the one before.
Hora pars vitae. His Latin master had made them write it out in lines. Every hour is a part of life.
Serius est quam cogitas, said the sundial in France. A modest construction in the garden of a small church where Leonard’s unit had collapsed, spent, during a muddy retreat. It’s later than you think.
‘Come on, Dog.’ The hound leapt to his feet and Leonard noted again the animal’s remarkable gift for optimism. He’d shown up on Leonard’s first night at Birchwood Manor, almost a month ago now, and they’d adopted one another by unspoken mutual agreement. Hard to know what sort of dog he was: large, brownish, a strong, hairy tail with a mind of its own.
They walked back towards the house, Leonard’s shirt damp where it pressed against his skin. A pair of red-tailed kites was hovering like a magic act in the air above a wheat field and Leonard had a sudden flashback to the front. An enormous ruined mansion that they’d stayed at one night in France, collapsed on one side but intact on the other. There’d been a clock in the black-and-white hallway, a grandfather clock that tocked even louder at night, counting down the minutes, though to what he was never sure; there never seemed to be an end.
One of the men had found a violin upstairs, in a dusty room of books and peacetime pleasures, and he carried it down to the garden and started playing, a haunting piece that Leonard vaguely knew. War by its nature was surreal: events so shocking that they could never become normal; further shock when inevitably they did. Day after day of dissonance as the old reality and the new sat side by side, as men who’d only months before been printers and shoemakers and clerks found themselves loading bullets into guns and dodging rats in waterlogged trenches.
To Leonard’s mind there had been no irony so great in the whole four-year stretch as that afternoon spent listening to violin music in a summery garden, while less than a mile away shells exploded and men lay dying. There had been falcons circling in the distant sky then: peregrine falcons, high above the action. They were unmoved by what was happening in the fields below. The mud and blood and slaughter, the senseless waste. They had the long memory of birds; they had seen it all before.
Humans could look back across time now, too. All it had taken was a war. Another irony: that the very aerial photography developed to help bombers cause maximum destruction was now being deployed by cartographers to reveal wondrous geographical preservation on the earth below.
Wars were useful like that, apparently. Leonard’s old school friend Anthony Baxter had told him so over a pint some months back. Necessity was the mother of invention, he’d said, and there was nothing so motivating as the need to survive. Anthony worked in manufacturing – some sort of new material replacing glass. There was a lot of money to be made, he’d continued, his cheeks flushed with ale and greed, if a fellow allowed himself to think creatively.