Amagansett

Twenty-Four

Conrad knew something was wrong when Rollo failed to show for work first thing Monday morning. He was never late. If anything, he was early. Conrad would often wake to find him sitting on the deck, waiting patiently, whittling a piece of driftwood or just staring into the distance.
Maybe he was ill. Unlikely. Conrad couldn’t remember the last time he’d been sick.
The answer arrived as he was finishing his breakfast. Two trucks pulled up beside the house. Four men got out. And Conrad knew immediately that he was in for a hard time.
He nodded at Rollo’s father. ‘Ned.’
‘Conrad.’
The other men cast their eyes around the buildings. None of them had visited before now; they’d never had reason to. Cap’n Jake Van Duyn showed particular interest in the barn, which was hardly surprising, seeing as his brother had sold it to Conrad a little over a year before.
‘Looks okay,’ he said.
He was a kindly man, blunt-spoken and fiercely proud of his Dutch origins. When he was in liquor he still railed against the politicians back home who had sold his ancestors down the Hudson River, trading New Amsterdam to the English for a handful of spice islands in the East Indies.
‘You know Jacob, Francis, Edwin,’ said Ned.
‘Sure.’ Though not well enough to call them by their Christian names. The familiarity of the introductions had an ominous ring to it.
‘You want some coffee?’
‘We’ll not stay long,’ said Ned.
‘Coffee would be good,’ said Cap’n Jake.
‘Why not?’
‘Sure.’
Ned wasn’t happy about being overruled, but he didn’t protest.
Conrad felt curiously detached serving coffee to the headmen of the oldest Amagansett clans. The Kemps, Paines, Songhursts and Van Duyns were known as the First Four. It was their forebears who had settled the village, dividing up the land amongst themselves, land that would prove to be the mainstay of their families’ enduring wealth and influence.
If the Gardiners—with their island out in the bay, a manor held by royal grant since the earliest days of settlement—represented the aristocracy, then the men sitting around Conrad’s table were the gentry of Amagansett. Other families had come and gone over the centuries, some even challenging their ascendancy, but they had ridden out the years ahead of the herd.
There was nothing overt about the hold they exercised over the village. Like the wind that turned the blades of the artesian wells and twisted the weathervanes, you couldn’t actually see it, but you knew it was there. It percolated the village, touching councils, committees, the schoolboard, even the Ladies’ Society of Busy Workers.
And like the wind, if it turned on you, if it really turned on you, there was nowhere it couldn’t reach.
‘You have any idea why we’re here?’ asked Ned.
‘Sure he does.’
Conrad looked Frank Paine hard in the eye. He was known for chewing cloves to hide the smell of alcohol on his breath. He was doing it now.
‘The girl who drowned,’ said Ned. ‘Rollo’s got it stuck in his head it don’t add up.’
‘Yeah?’
‘That’s what he says. Says she couldn’t have drowned where they say she did and ended up off the beach here. Says the set was too strong, she’d have been carried a ways down.’
‘The ocean can do strange things,’ said Conrad. ‘Remember Elsie Bangs.’
Elsie Bangs was a neighbor of Sam Ockham’s down at Lazy Point who’d gone clamming at the mouth of Napeague Harbor one evening a few years before the war. Her family went hungry that night. It was assumed that she’d lost her footing near the edge of the deep channel and gone under. She certainly drowned. Two weeks later her badly decomposed body was washed ashore at Dead Man’s Hole on the back side. She was identified by a stocking garter stitched for her in school by her daughter.
Once people had overcome their surprise at the idea of Elsie wearing stockings to go clamming, they began remarking on the extraordinary journey her body had taken. Against the prevailing currents she had traveled east, past the Montauk fishing village at Fort Pond Bay, rounding Montauk Point and bearing west along the ocean shore, hugging the bluffs, before being cast up at Dead Man’s Hole, a distance of some fifteen nautical miles from where she’d disappeared.
‘It ain’t often the ocean plays tricks like that,’ said Edwin Songhurst, old but not yet stooped, still husky and raw-boned.
‘Take your brother,’ added Ned. ‘He showed up right where we said he would.’
Not exactly true. One small part of Antton—an arm, one shoulder and his head, all still attached to each other, but barely—had been washed ashore a little to the east of the area they’d been searching in.
‘Why’d you go at Charlie Walsh over them earrings off the girl?’ asked Frank Paine.
Conrad turned to him. ‘What would you have done? Pocket them yourself?’
‘Let’s keep this civil,’ said Ned. ‘We know you knew her, Conrad. Rollo saw you two together.’
Conrad tried to think straight, but failed, his thoughts collapsing in on themselves.
‘When?’ he asked.
‘It don’t matter when.’
‘He’s no cause to lie.’
‘And nor do you.’
It can’t have been rehearsed, but it worked—a gentle yet firm assault on all fronts, each chipping in their bit, having their say.
‘Yeah, I knew her.’
It explained a lot, Rollo knowing. It explained his reaction when they’d pulled Lillian from the ocean—silent, shrinking, living Conrad’s horror. It explained his blind fury when he came to Conrad’s aid in the parking lot at Oyster Hall, and his attentiveness in the following days. It explained a lot he should have picked up on before, but hadn’t, and he wondered what else he’d missed.
The current, for one. If Conrad knew her body should have been carried further eastward by the longshore drift, then Rollo certainly did. He could read the waters off the back side better than anyone.
‘Where’s Rollo?’ he asked.
‘He’s okay,’ said Ned. ‘A little upset is all.’
‘How’s that?’
‘I had to work it out of him. He’s been acting odd for a bit now; was worse than ever Saturday after you two went tuna fishing.’
‘Yeah?’
‘He thinks you’ve got a problem with the girl’s brother.’
‘Her name’s Lillian.’
‘Do you?’ demanded Cap’n Jake.
Conrad felt a sudden urge to unburden himself, but as he looked into their eyes he saw what he already knew: that they hadn’t come here for him, they’d come here for themselves.
‘Yes, I knew Lillian Wallace,’ he said. ‘As for the rest, I couldn’t say; you’ll have to take it up with Rollo.’
‘What passed between you and this…Lillian is your business,’ said Cap’n Jake. ‘Anything else is ours too.’
Conrad got to his feet. ‘Are we done here?’
‘Not if that’s your attitude,’ said Frank Paine.
Conrad fastened his eyes on him. ‘You don’t understand. I’m asking you to leave.’
Glances were exchanged, but what could they do? A man was entitled to call the shots in his own home.
Conrad made a point of holding the door open for them. Ned lingered while the others headed to the trucks.
‘I done some asking,’ he said. ‘They’re rich folk them Wallaces, powerful folk, with pull. You think we don’t already have us enough problems with that bill comin’ up in Albany?’
‘This isn’t about fishing.’
‘You’re a fisherman. You do anything rash, we all look bad. You know that.’
In the last year there’d been a marked rise in hostilities between the local fishermen and the recreational anglers, who had taken to dumping scrap iron in the favored dragging spots so the nets got hung up and torn. Gear left on the beach overnight would be sabotaged. Any kind of retaliation had the sports racing for the State Assembly in Albany, like the school bully running to teacher with a bloody nose. Just the month before, Seth Tuttle had taken a knife to the tires of a surfcaster’s sedan. The lawyers pushing for the bass bill were all over it still.
‘They’ll bend it any way they like if you give ‘em the excuse,’ said Ned.
‘They don’t need an excuse. One thing I’ve learned: money takes what it wants then comes back for more.’
‘We’ll beat them.’
‘This year, maybe. Next, too. But they’ll keep coming back, they’ll win in the end, they always do.’
Ned glanced over at the others waiting in the trucks.
‘I’m sorry for the girl,’ he said, looking back. ‘I am. But if anything happens to Rollo, you’ll have me to answer to.’ He paused. ‘You put a mark on my word, you hear me?’
Conrad nodded.
‘He won’t be pitchin’ up for work no more. If he shows, you turn him away.’
The moment the trucks left, Conrad felt the strength drain out of him through his boots. He set about tidying away the cups, but found himself reaching for a chair and slumping into it.
Rollo was the closest thing he had to kin. He was alone—the way it had to be, he knew that—but he hadn’t seen it hitting so hard. At least it had come from Ned, at least he’d been spared the task of driving Rollo off. His plan had been to lie, fall back on the ribs as an excuse, to suggest they take a break for a week or so while he fully recovered, by which time it should all be over.
He had played the scene with Rollo in his head, but he hadn’t thought about how it might hit him. There was no solace in the seclusion, just one scrap of comfort: Rollo was safe now; he couldn’t be damaged by the misfortune that seemed intent on dogging Conrad, circling him, sparing him while picking off those around him, almost in mockery.
He had never discussed it with anyone, fearing that his words would only breathe more life into the specter. It was the men of his Company in Italy who had first forced the issue into the open.
He wasn’t the only one to survive the grueling assault on Monte la Difensa—their first bitter taste of combat in Italy—but few who had been in the thick of the fight had emerged completely unscathed. Twice he’d been lifted clear off his feet by the vacuum of a shell from an enemy 88 snapping past his head. He had cowered like all the others as lead from the MG-42s tore into the icy rock around them, but not once had he been so much as nicked by one of the lethal shards of flying granite. He had seen the aluminum fin of an enemy shell embed itself in the forehead of a man crouching beside him in a German slit trench they’d only just occupied; and against all apparent logic he’d witnessed a good friend disappear in a plume of scarlet vapor when the fellow was standing further from the mortar burst than himself.
At night, the time when they did most of their work, it was as if an invisible hand was swatting away the tracer bullets arcing through the darkness towards him, like shooting stars fallen to earth. One time, returning from a raid, he had been bounding over the rocks back to his lines when he collided with an enemy soldier coming in the opposite direction. Thrown to the ground, they both spilled their weapons in the darkness. The German was first to react, snatching up the nearest gun, which happened to be Conrad’s M-1, beating him to the draw. The M-1 jammed. The German’s Schmeisser didn’t.
‘You’re one lucky sonofabitch,’ Dexter had remarked one night during a welcome lull between barrages. By now they had secured the summit, repelling numerous German counterattacks, and were preparing for an assault on the saddle below so the British could have a crack at the peak of Monte Camino. It was a cold night with a light sleet falling and they were hunched beneath their ponchos, spread out in foxholes along the first line of defense.
‘I want her number, Labarde,’ called Crane.
‘Who’s that?’
‘Your fairy godmother.’
‘Me, I got a lucky rabbit’s foot,’ came another voice.
‘Not so l-l-l-ucky for the goddamn r-r-r-abbit.’
The laughter built quickly along the line until they were all creased up—young men; boys, most of them—finding a vent for their confusion and fear.
Maybe the German forward observers heard them, maybe not, but the mortars started landing again. They really worked them over this time. When it was done, the joker in the night—the stocky lumberjack from Wyoming with the stammer—had bought it from a direct hit.
Dexter hurried over to his foxhole to check on him. ‘He’s like God.’
‘You mean with God,’ said someone.
‘I mean God is everywhere.’
Not long after, with their combat casualty rate nudging sixty per cent, they were pulled out of the mountains and assigned to the thirty-two-mile-long stalemate that was the Anzio beachhead. Caught unawares by the amphibious landing deep behind their lines, the German army had soon retrenched and began throwing everything they had at the Allied forces, intent on driving them back into the sea. Penned in like cattle in a narrow corral, they were strafed and bombed from the air. Long-range 88mm and 170mm artillery shells rained down on them day and night, as did the flak from their own anti-aircraft guns, almost as deadly.
That first month, shell fragments accounted for almost all of their casualties. When a lone shell burst killed the three Canadians with whom Conrad was playing a game of horseshoes one dismal gray afternoon, the other men in the outfit began avoiding him.
No one ever voiced it straight to his face. They didn’t need to; it was clear what they were thinking. In its apparent eagerness to spare Conrad, Death seized those around him instead. Even the young, poorly trained replacements shipped in to bolster their dwindling ranks knew of his reputation and kept their distance.
Only the Professor sought out his company, and then only in order to play chess. Driven below ground into the warren of trenches and dugouts by the constant aerial assaults, they relieved the torpor of static warfare by rigging radio sets from razor blades, using pilfered tank headsets to tune into ‘Axis Sally’s’ broadcasts. They made light of her taunts, while being strangely drawn to the sultry lilt of her voice. They speculated about her looks, settling on a pleasing confection of Jeanne Crain and Lana Turner—part girl-next-door, part smoldering temptress—and they described in salacious detail exactly what they would do if given a few hours alone with her in the suite of a top hotel. Above all, though, they tuned in to her because of the music. You might be huddled in a damp hole on the edge of the Pontine marshes, but thanks to Sally you could still listen to the very latest songs from back home. Their standing as a commando force to be reckoned with had been secured by their successful assault on Monte la Difensa, where the US 3rd Infantry, the 36th, and the British 56th had all tried and failed before them. They now raised that reputation further on both sides of the front line with their deep-penetration night raids out over the Mussolini Canal, stepping gingerly through the minefields, employing a little psychological warfare of their own, leaving calling cards on the foreheads of their unsuspecting victims emblazoned with the message: DAS DICKE ENDE KOMMT NOCH!—The Worst is Yet to Come.
They came and went like ghosts in the night, using their guns only as a last resort, their weapon of choice being the combat knife. A fear soon took a grip of the enemy troops ranged directly across from them on the eastern flank of the beachhead. They learned from German prisoners that they were known as the ‘Black Devils’ or the ‘Devils in Baggy Pants’ because of their loose, billowing mountain fatigues.
They didn’t take as many prisoners as they might have, but then the nature of the lightning raids didn’t allow for it. Likewise, any of their number captured while on patrol was more likely to end up on the Killed in Action roster than on a truck bound for a German stalag. The first infringement of the Geneva Conventions that Conrad witnessed was committed by a man in his own unit—a part-Indian fur trapper from Vermont. It had proved impossible to sustain his levels of disgust, though, for within a week he too had joined the club. You told yourself that that was war, and maybe some even believed it. Others suspected and feared that the reasons lay closer to home, in some darkened corner of themselves.
It was a dirty conflict, a war of attrition, and by the time the order came through for the breakout from the beachhead many of those whom Conrad had originally trained with in the mountains of Montana were dead, maimed or otherwise unfit for line duty. Exhaustion and disease had claimed a fair number, mental imbalance more than you could ever have predicted.
One night, after a particularly severe pounding by the German 88s, Reg Horley had stripped off, hurled himself into the Mussolini Canal and started swimming in circles, kicking beneath the surface every so often. When he was finally dragged from the water he explained, between racking sobs, that he was looking for his father’s wristwatch. It was a mildly amusing incident, but you knew you were in trouble when the medics started losing it.
The Professor was one of the few beacons of sanity in the madness unfolding around them. Some warned him about his association with Conrad, but the Professor seemed content with their games of chess and their nocturnal forays to recover the bodies of fallen GIs. They rarely touched on the subject of their other lives, placed on hold on the far side of the world. The one time they had done so, it hadn’t gone well.
‘What do you hunt?’ the Professor had asked while they were setting up the board one night.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Last night when you picked off that Jerry trying to outflank us—swing-lead-squeeze,’ he said, demonstrating. ‘One shot, no waste. I figure you hunt, you know, back home.’
‘Black duck, quail, coot, some deer,’ said Conrad. ‘You?’
‘Canadian geese. We get a lot in southern Illinois, though we near wiped them out twenty years back, squeezed the season down to a month.’
Conrad told the Professor about Sam and Billy Ockham—their little hunting trio—tramping through the frosty underbrush on winter mornings, crouching in duck blinds, rowing their sharpies out to Cartwright Shoals for some open-water coot shooting, and poaching wild turkey in the primeval forests of Gardiner’s Island during the Depression.
A little while later, the Professor looked up from the board. ‘It’s the first time I’ve seen you kill a man,’ he said.
‘I guess,’ said Conrad.
‘How does it feel?’
Conrad shrugged the question off, could have played on in silence, but he stepped through the door the Professor had opened, regretting it later.
‘I can’t remember,’ he said. ‘How it feels.’
‘I couldn’t do it.’
‘You might have to.’
‘Some things you know.’
‘Don’t be so sure.’
‘It’s not a criticism. Don’t take it as a criticism. It isn’t.’
‘So what are you doing here?’ asked Conrad.
‘Helping.’
‘Clearing up our mess?’
‘Someone’s got to. I don’t have a problem with death.’
‘That’s right, I forgot, we’re all just vehicles for bacteria.’
‘Don’t be like that. I couldn’t do what you do, that’s all I’m saying.’
‘But you bought yourself a ringside seat. Why is that?’
‘Conrad…’ said the Professor gently.
‘Who do you think you are, Florence f*ckin’ Nightingale?’
‘Conrad…’
‘No, screw you!’ He swept the pieces off the board on to the earth-packed floor.
‘Girls, girls…’ They turned to see Captain Roxburgh enter the dugout. ‘We just got our marching orders,’ he said.
He didn’t see the Professor for two days. Conrad’s unit was one of those chosen to spearhead the drive out of the beachhead, and they left at dawn the next morning. It was a warm May day, a day of slaughter and confusion. You couldn’t challenge the brass, but the decision to advance across open ground devoid of any cover in broad daylight displayed all the tactical wisdom of a general on the first day of the Battle of the Somme.
When they weren’t being devastated by German machine-gun fire and artillery airbursts they fell prey to friendly fire from the rear. The promised tank support evaporated, with many of the Shermans throwing their tracks when they ran over antipersonnel mines, and the ones that didn’t proving no match for the German Tigers with their superior firepower. It was a miracle that any of them managed to reach Highway 6 and the railroad tracks by nightfall.
Fierce fighting on day two depleted their numbers further, but they continued their thrust towards the Alban hills, advancing well beyond the flanking units, arriving at the ancient village of Cori, perched high above the plain, as the afternoon heat was easing off. In stark contrast to the stiff German resistance, they were welcomed by hordes of cheering Italians. Many of the men were mistrustful of a people who had switched allegiance halfway through a war, but Conrad couldn’t really care. He remembered something the Professor had once said: ‘The thing about the Italians is, they’ve seen civilizations rise and fall and they know it’s all a lot of crap.’
They rested up in the shade of the Roman temple beside the church, and Conrad wondered how many other soldiers had done exactly the same over the centuries.
Towards dusk, he was refilling his canteen from a nearby well when he heard a voice from behind him.
‘Make mine a double.’
It wasn’t that the Professor looked tired—they’d been functioning at a level of terminal exhaustion for so long now that you no longer noticed it in others or yourself—but he looked depleted, as if some incubus had drained him of vital fluids. The ever-present chuckle behind his green eyes was gone and his bloodied fatigues seemed to hang off him.
‘Here—’ said Conrad, handing him the canteen.
The Professor emptied it then caught his breath.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Conrad.
‘Me too.’
That night they went out together again, just like old times, searching for the dead. A section from 3rd Regiment had been worked over by a mortar crew earlier in the day to the west of Cori, taking numerous casualties, abandoned in the field. It was assumed the Germans had retreated to the hills, but you couldn’t be too sure. They were dogged fighters, to be respected, and both sides knew there was too much at stake. If the Allies were allowed to reach Highway 7 the tide of battle would turn. The Appian Way would lead them straight into the heart of Rome, the coveted prize.
The moon was near full, the limestone path bright beneath his feet as Conrad scouted the lower slopes of the hills. He sniffed the air for cigarette smoke and freshly turned earth, but there was nothing. If they were up there and dug in, they were well beyond range. He padded back to the Professor, who was lurking in an olive grove, and they struck out through the adjacent pasture, the tall grass swishing against their legs.
The first body was intact, or near enough. While Conrad stood guard, the Professor gathered up something and placed it beside the corpse. This was how he liked to work, circumstances permitting—assessing the overall damage, reconstructing, before beginning the process of removal. Ten minutes later, he was ready. He unfolded a tarpaulin, laying it on the ground, and rolled the first body on to it.
The blast from the explosion knocked Conrad sideways, sending him sprawling into the grass. The screams began before the last of the debris had fallen to earth.
‘Oh Christ! Oh Christ…’
Conrad stayed low as he scrabbled towards the Professor, the next mortar due any moment. Due now. Where was it?
‘Oh Christ!’
The blast had taken the Professor’s left leg off below the knee. His right foot was also missing, and he was staring at the void where his left hand had been, holding the ragged stump up to the moon for a better view.
‘Shit,’ he said. ‘Shit…’
Conrad pushed him back down on to the ground and pumped two shots of morphine into him.
‘Conrad.’
‘It’s me, I’m here.’ He used his knife to cut a length of the parachute cord he always carried with him.
‘They rigged it, they rigged the body, the sonsofbitches rigged the body.’
Conrad fashioned a hasty tourniquet and secured it above the left knee.
‘You sonsofbitches!’ screamed the Professor. ‘YOU SONSOFBITCHES!’
Conrad wanted to say ‘Keep quiet, don’t give them the satisfaction,’ and he prayed the Germans were long gone.
The Professor struggled, resisting, as Conrad tried to apply a tourniquet to his other leg.
‘Lie still, goddamnit.’
‘Don’t do it, don’t do it.’
The Professor twisted, rolling away. Conrad went after him, straddling his chest, pinning him to the ground.
‘I don’t want to live. Not like this.’
He was sobbing now, slapping at Conrad with his only hand, snatching at the loop of rope.
‘Okay,’ said Conrad, holding up his hands in surrender.
The Professor stopped resisting. ‘Thanks, thanks…’ he gasped.
Conrad slugged him on the jaw, fitted the tourniquets and applied sulfa to the stumps.
He was doing double time along a dirt track about a mile from Cori when the Professor came to, slung over his shoulder like a sack of fish meal. Conrad closed his ears to the curses. The pummeling of the fist on his back was too weak to have any effect. They said there were no atheists in trenches, but not once did the Professor call out to God, remaining an unbeliever till the end, which came a few minutes later, half a mile shy of the aid station. Not that they could have done anything for him. Way too much of his blood had already soaked into Conrad’s fatigues.
He laid the Professor in the grass beside the track and sat with him a while. Then he carried him the rest of the way in his arms.
The two medics on duty at the aid station were enjoying a wellearned rest, but they insisted on checking Conrad over for injuries. He could have told them that beneath all the gore he would be completely unmarked. When they were done, they set him up with a shot of brandy and stretchered the body away.
He was gone before they returned, pounding off down the track, back towards the hills.
It was reckless soldiering, but stealth wasn’t the answer. He could have crept through the wooded slopes for the rest of the night and never found them. The answer lay in covering as much terrain as possible, crashing his way through the undergrowth, drawing attention to himself.
He was making his way up the side of a valley when a burst of fire raked the branches above his head. He hit the ground, scrabbling for cover behind a tree. Someone shouted in German—a challenge.
‘Schwarze Teufel!’ he called back: Black Devil. He heard the soldier relay the information to his comrades, a satisfying note of panic in his voice. Then the lead started flying again, tracers this time, which meant only one thing.
He was gone before the first mortar tore into the trees. If they were using the mortar they must be occupying an area of open ground beyond the tree line up near the ridge. He dismissed the idea of a direct assault, not because the terrain would play in their favor, but because he figured they’d soon be thinking about retreating. They knew who they were up against, they’d heard the stories, and the silence of the night would soon transmute into fear.
He was waiting for them near the foot of the neighboring valley—two mortar crews, six men, pounding down a woodland path, equipment clattering. Whether they were the ones responsible, he neither knew nor cared, his head thick with thoughts of vengeance.
He had already pulled the pins from the grenades, but he waited for the point man to pass before tossing them, opening fire before they exploded, ducking behind a tree as they did so.
The two who didn’t die immediately, he finished off with the knife. One was very young, wispy hairs masquerading as a mustache, wheezing his last terrified breath as Conrad slowly slid the blade between his ribs, talking to him, cursing him, the same words the Professor had hurled at him, handing them on: take these with you.
When he was done, he smoked a cigarette then placed the barrel of the M-1 in his mouth, but he was unable to pull the trigger.
He returned to Cori via the pasture, recovering the Professor’s shattered glasses from the long grass.
It was a miracle that the glasses had somehow stayed in his possession for the remainder of the war. He took it as a sign that they had, and he’d kept them on the writing desk in his bedroom ever since.
One evening, as Lillian was undressing, she had asked him, ‘What are these?’
She stood naked beside the bed—completely unabashed, as she had been from the very first—turning the glasses in her hands.
‘Nothing,’ said Conrad.
‘Are they yours?’
‘I don’t want to talk about it.’
She replaced the glasses on the desk, turned the light off and joined him in the bed, snuggling up close.
‘If I were you,’ she said softly, ‘and I didn’t want to talk about it, I wouldn’t have left them out.’
He lay there in silence, hating her for seeing through him, loving her for exactly the same reason. She made no attempt to press him further, and that was probably why he began to speak.
He didn’t start at the beginning and he didn’t start at the end, he started in the middle and he leapt around, doubling back on himself. She asked very few questions. There was no need; the words tumbled out of him.
He told her about the Professor and his beaky nose and their games of chess and the gut-rot hooch they used to buy from the officers’ mess—alcoholic footwash destined for the brass, but distilled through bread and flogged off to the rank-and-file by the batmen. He told her about the low, menacing profile of a Tiger tank, the silence of an 88 shell as the sound struggled to keep up with it, the spine-chilling shriek of the Nebelwerfer rockets, and he tried to describe the helpless terror of a sustained artillery barrage, bent double in a slit trench, the ground quaking, shaking your fillings loose.
He told her about the friends who had died, the ones who had cracked up and been shipped out, the ones who had been maimed. He described the horrors of the ‘far ward’ at the field hospital, nurses holding cigarettes to the mouths of men who had lost their arms, others with whole parts of their faces missing, being fed ground liver squeezed through a tube.
He told her what he had done to the men who might or might not have been responsible for the Professor’s death, and he described their triumphal entry into Rome a few days later. He detailed the baroque splendor of Castel Gandolfo, the pope’s summer residence perched high above the shores of Lake Albano where they were sent to recuperate for a few weeks. Unreal afternoons spent lazing on the volcanic sand beaches of the lake, swimming in the aquamarine water, sipping crisp dry Frascati wine from the nearby hills and flirting with the local girls. Dreamlike memories they desperately clung to when their orders finally came through and they found themselves back in the thick of the action—in France this time, clearing Germans from a scattering of islands off the south coast, then fighting their way eastwards along the Riviera, securing the border with Italy, where the mountains collided with the sea and where Conrad’s war came to an abrupt end.
He told her how it happened, though not why, because he wasn’t sure of the answer himself, even then. All he knew was that war left you clinging to the raft of your own sanity, not because of the horror—that, you grew used to—but because it tore at the heart of every man’s being, his sense of who he was.
You could be brave one minute, a coward the next, selfless then cruel, compassionate and heartless within moments of each other. You spent a lifetime forging a view of what made you tick, what marked you out from other men, massaging yourself into being. Then war came along and ripped that construct limb from limb. It seized you by the neck, pressed your face to the mirror and showed you that you weren’t one thing or another, but all things at the same time. The only question was: which bit of you would show itself next? That’s what f*cked you up. The not knowing.
He told Lillian all this. It was far more than he had ever told anyone, though that wasn’t saying much. The only other person he had spoken to was the doctor at the hospital in England, and that had been under duress.
When he was finished, Lillian held him tight and kissed him on the neck, her cheek wet with tears, cold against his skin.
‘It’s okay now,’ she said.
And he had laughed, not in derision, not in amusement, but because she was absolutely right.
It was.