Alistair gave him twenty seconds and then said, “No, not really.”
Simonson opened one bloodshot eye. “You vile, vile bastard.”
“Returning the favor for your help with my speech last week. Coffee?”
“I hope it poisons you.”
“My man Briggs is brewing some. Come over to my room. And then we must rouse the men and get ourselves operational again.”
Simonson eyed the clouds. “The Germans won’t come today.”
“They won’t need to, if we let this rot set in. Everyone’s still snoring.”
Simonson pulled his jacket over his head. “It worked for the French.”
Alistair laughed. “I thought you wanted to make major.”
“Yes, so oiks like you can do the drudgery.”
“Did I mention,” said Alistair, “that our friendship means the world to me?”
Simonson only groaned.
“But it does, you know. I’m mildly glad every time you’re not killed.”
Simonson opened half an eye and leered at him. ‘At last. Meet me in the showers at midnight, and for god’s sake not a word to Matron.”
For the rest of the day the two captains saw to the men of their battery. There were the injured to be evacuated to the hospitals farther inland, the badly battle-frayed to be rotated out for R&R, and the battery’s eight guns to be consolidated down to six fully manned units. Everything needed repairing, cleaning and oiling. Each of the 3.7s needed releveling on its jacks, every sight needed recalibrating, and every signal line had to be taken up, checked for breaks and relaid.
Inside, in the labyrinthine fort, everything had been shaken from its shelf, or taken to the wrong place in the chaos, or stolen or eaten or sublimated. It was a mercy that every unit of the British Army came so fully documented that it could be reassembled from its constituent parts by men who had hardly slept. Alistair and Simonson worked their battery back up to readiness using the technical manuals and the quartermaster’s equipment list. If they had happened to pick up the wrong instructions at the beginning of the day, it seemed to Alistair that they might just as easily have ended up with a bus company, or a small dairy farm.
At nightfall there was still so much fuel oil in the sea that Alistair half expected the setting sun to ignite it. He was too tired to think straight. He stumbled up the stone staircase to his room and sat down on his cot. Airmail had come during the day—a Wellington had slipped in through the lull in the enemy’s air cover—and a letter was waiting for him on his desk. He slit the envelope open, not recognizing the hand.
Alistair,
I hope you shan’t mind if I write. You must feel as rotten as I do without Tom. I was going through his things when I found a letter you wrote to him, asking forgiveness for the night you and I met. I do not know whether he managed to reply.
I thought it might do you good to know that Tom often spoke of you. He looked up to you. He was never reconciled to staying in London while you put your neck on the line. So if Tom seemed distant in his letters toward the end, you mustn’t think that he meant to be. Some days he could seem a thousand miles from me, even though we would be sitting at the same table.
Everyone is tired here, after so many months of bombing. There is a distance between all of us now. I do not mean to be maudlin, only to tell you how it is in London. After the war of course it will be like the start of spring, which is always so brilliantly sudden. The leaves will burst back onto the trees and close the gaps between the branches and we shall be startled—shan’t we?—as we are startled at the end of every winter. We shall think: oh, I had quite forgotten there were three livable seasons.
Tom wouldn’t want us to be sad. The crocuses are out now in Regent’s Park, and I picked some this morning and took them to his grave. I arranged them as best I could, and then I came home. On the way home the train was crowded. I was hungry. There was a man in my compartment with an irritating laugh. One does not rise above the everyday simply because one ought to. In the end I suppose we lay flowers on graves because we cannot lay ourselves on them.