The First of July(105)

She shivers slightly as she moves into the heavy shade of the trees as she rounds the corner. She is chilly despite the heat of the day. It occurs to her that in some ways she is better off than her friends. In time, she thinks, America will be sucked into this European war. It’s inevitable, or so she hears from friends whose husbands are close to the President’s circle. It will not take much. One more Lusitania. One more secret channel exposing German hostility to American interests. A few months. A year. So married girls and mothers with handsome sons were anxious now, seeing their men differently: not as absolutely theirs but, already, on a different path. The men themselves behaving in subtly changing ways, excited, apprehensive. It was almost like suspecting your husband had a lover, her friend Nancy had said. Wondering if he’d be with you next summer, wondering what he was thinking about.

They might petition highly placed friends, but their menfolk would be plucked from them eventually, just as they had been last winter in Britain. Conscription. American women live with that fear. Whereas her Harry has chosen to go, and the two of them have been through it all, and yet here they still are: her a married woman, waiting, and him her husband and a soldier. It is an old, old story, and it is behind her, the sick anticipation and the leaving and the first selfish loneliness.

Harry’s letters, sketches, his roughly drawn caricatures, his anecdotes and regrets, his dark moments often followed swiftly by an apology and reassurances, are all she needs. Sometimes she thinks that she and Harry have become closer, now that they communicate through letters, than they had been when their every day had been spent together and either they had been too wrapped up in each other, or unable to talk of war and fear and weakness because it all seemed too fragile. She is stronger, more independent now. Around her the city turns, but she thinks of Harry and the unfinished letter on her desk. She feels, very suddenly, an overwhelming pride in her husband and, equally suddenly, she understands. He had not chosen a cause he didn’t believe in over a marriage that he didn’t quite believe in either. She had known instantly, on that first visit to Abbotsgate, that he had once loved his stepmother, which was why he’d arrived in New York and in her life. She had come to realize only much later that he no longer felt as once he had.

She is glad her husband is fighting, that he believed he should because other men he’d known a long time ago were fighting for the country where he had grown up. A small lump rises in her throat and tightness radiates across her shoulder blades. Harry, she thinks. I do love you so frighteningly much.

The sweet smell of the blossoms reaches her before she turns the corner to where the old Italian lady stands behind her flowers like a woodland creature hiding in exotic shrubbery. Marina decides that she will press one perfect bloom and send it to Harry to explain all the thoughts of her summer day.





CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT


Harry, France,

July 1, 1916, Early Evening


MY BROTHER, HARRY IS STILL thinking. He tries to retrieve that earlier summer’s day, when his father died, war began, and he first saw Teddy standing in the hall, in mourning, yet looking at him curiously. Teddy was always just my brother, he thinks. But he cannot hold on to any thought for long.

He had looked up at blue skies a few hours earlier, astonished by the birds, faltering in their song but still there. Now he lies back, his face to the sun, his eyes closed. He imagines it is any other July day in his thirty-four years when he might have thrown himself carelessly to the ground. A picnic. The end of a hard set of tennis. Being lifted off his father’s shoulders. He tries to ignore the fact that his legs no longer respond to his will. Just for a short time he is out of this foxhole of seven men, one minus his head and one with his intestines leaking out of him and with it the stink of feces. He tries to remember grass and laughter and lemonade, and just for a second he has them.

He struggles to make sense of what has happened since he led a much larger number of men into action. They got through the wire, but the Germans were more than ready for them. It is only the fact that the surviving soldiers seem as numb as he feels that allows him time to try to work out where they are now and to decide what to do next. He knows they will have to wait until dark to move back. He is gripped with thirst; but when he feels for a water bottle, he finds it missing. Corporal Jones appears beside him, his face bright and shining red with blood. He sits with his back against the raw earth, with one great sigh but without saying a word, and hands Harry his own. As Harry drinks, his uninjured leg keeps trembling and he tries to still it with his hand.

The ragged edges of this small world seemed blurred and insubstantial like the shimmer of any hot day. Time, too, seems to be playing tricks. He closes his eyes against the sun that is hurting them and wakes to find that it has almost disappeared from his view and he is now lying in shadow, the lower rays just skimming the broken chalk at the crater’s lip. He is shivering with cold and nausea. He thinks of his men—boys, many of them, scarcely more than half his age—who had also believed what he told them. Then he reaches for Marina, but pain and shock make memories too hard to assemble.