The First of July(79)

The river smelled slightly of drains, but the slight wind ruffled the lime trees and he could smell those too. From time to time as the wind changed direction, he thought he caught the smell of the hospital barges: sweat, carbolic, festering wounds, ether.

A French officer tapped him lightly on the arm. “Cigarette?” he said, holding a silver case toward him.

Benedict shook his head. “Merci. Non.”

The officer smiled; his teeth were very white against his black beard, yet now that he studied the man more closely, he could see the lines of fatigue behind the handsome face. The man had already turned to offer cigarettes to the young nurses.

A brandy materialized in front of him. He looked away; a camouflaged truck drove past, followed by an Army staff car. He picked up his glass; the brandy was almost undrinkable. From behind him, he heard the French officer say “How do you do,” in an accent that wouldn’t have sounded out of place in the mouth of a comic foreigner on the stage, and the nurses burst into loud laughter. Chairs scraped, and the next time he looked, the officer was somehow between them.

He looked from the three of them laughing in the sun and then to the nearest barge and then down at the piece of meat resting on his meager piece of pickled cabbage. He cut it, and what looked like a fan of brown entrails sprang out.

When a hand fell on his shoulder, he expected it to be the Frenchman and dreaded being asked to join their jolly table; but then a voice said “Well, what a coincidence,” and he recognized the greeting and his neck felt tight just as he turned and saw, to his astonishment, that it was indeed Theo. Theo looking dashing in an eccentric version of his Flying Corps uniform. Theo grinning, bonier and evidently excited to see him. Theo instantly opposite him, blocking out the view, trying his brandy and ordering one himself as well as a pot of mussels. Theo, and Benedict’s eyes went to the hand and moved swiftly away.

“You look well,” Theo said. “Are you well? Is life being at all kind?”

Benedict found himself nodding rather than speaking. “Leave,” he said. “I go back tonight.”

All at once he wanted to weep.

“Just the thing. How unutterably splendid. I’m off for the day. They say it’s the last leave for a while.”

Theo made a face: the same face he’d made at Gloucester when Dr. Brewer had rehearsed the choir endlessly. Benedict thought he was avoiding making more than fleeting eye contact. Had he always been like this?

“Have you been back to Blighty?” Theo said, as if they had known each other, vaguely, in the past.

“Not for months.”

In truth, although pleased to see his sister back in March, and to wash regularly and have his uniform cleaned, Benedict had been bored rigid at home. He’d played the tiny, wheezing organ in the parish church, been admired by the old ladies, and spent much of the time asleep.

“You?”

“Went home. Saw Father. Current stepmother-to-be. All very pleasant, but nothing had changed. Which was odd, because I had, and yet nobody seemed to notice. Dropped by Gloucester.”

“How was Agnes?”

Theo waved an arm. “Obliging. Let me kiss her. Terribly excited by the uniform.”

Benedict wondered what Dr. Brewer had thought or said, seeing Theo’s mutilated hand.

“Have you arranged a date? For the wedding?” he said.

Theo drank the brandy as if it were water, then shuddered.

“God, this is repulsive stuff. A man would need to be seriously committed to drunkenness to get in the habit of it. No, of course I haven’t. She might be a widow in a month.”

“But you are engaged to be married?”

“Oh, absolutely. Completely. Announcement in The Times any day now. Squeezed in between the casualty lists.”

After all the years of friendship, Benedict still couldn’t sense whether Theo was making the whole thing up, nor could he ever tell him how much he hoped the story of his courtship and his plans for marriage were another fantasy. More and more, he thought they were.

“Mind you,” his friend said, “she’d look marvelous in black, don’t you think? Trouble is,” he went on without waiting for an answer, “I wouldn’t be there to see it. Some other bugger would, and he’d be consoling her in less time than it takes to say ‘staff officer.’”

The mussels arrived in a steaming pot and Theo, insisting that Benedict eat with him, set to, discarding some, tapping others on the rim, sucking out the tiny pieces of flesh as if he had lived on mussels all his life. His scarred hand lifted—it never fully unfolded, Benedict noticed; it was an implement, but one that had lost its fine movement—then set down the empty shells, and eventually he mopped up the liquor with a chunk of bread.