Your loving, Hester
2011
The first time Leah met the man who would change her life, he was lying face down on a steel table, quite oblivious to her. Odd patches of his clothing remained, the colour of mud, slick with moisture. The bottom half of a trouser leg, the shoulders of his jacket. She felt cold on his behalf, and slightly awkward faced with his nakedness. His head was turned away from her, face half pressed to the table so that all she could see were the carved dark structures of his hair, and one perfect, waxen ear. Leah’s skin prickled; she felt voyeuristic. As though he was only asleep, might at any minute stir, turn his head and look at her; woken by her footsteps and the sound of her breathing in that immaculate ear.
‘You’re not going to throw up, are you?’ Ryan’s voice broke into her trance. She swallowed, shook her head. Ryan smiled mischievously.
‘Who is he? Was he?’ she asked, clearing her throat, folding her arms in a show of nonchalance.
‘If we knew that, I wouldn’t have called you all the way out to Belgium.’ Ryan shrugged, airily. He was wearing a white coat, like a doctor, but it was grubby and marked, and hung open to show torn jeans, a scuffed leather belt.
‘First time seeing a dead body?’ Peter asked, with his calm, Gallic intonation. Peter, the head of the archaeology department.
‘Yes.’ Leah nodded.
‘Always an odd experience. At least with one this old, there’s no smell. Well, not the worst kind of smell, anyway,’ he said. Leah realised she’d been breathing through her mouth; shallow breaths, expecting the worst. She inhaled cautiously through her nose. There was a dank smell, almost tangy; like wet January leaves, like estuarine mud.
She fumbled in her bag, drew out her pad and pen.
‘Where did you say he was found?’ she asked.
‘In the back garden of a house near Zonnebeke, north-east of Ypres. A Mrs Bichet was digging a grave for her dog …’ Ryan paused, pretended to check his notes, ‘her dog Andre, if I have it correctly.’ He smiled, that curving, lopsided grin that made something pull in Leah’s bones. She raised an eyebrow at him, nothing more. Under the strip lights his skin looked dull and there were shadows under his eyes. But he was still beautiful, she thought helplessly. Still beautiful. ‘Digging one grave and stumbled across another. She nearly took his right arm off with the shovel – see here.’ He pointed carefully to the dead man’s forearm. Beige skin had parted, brown flesh protruded, fibrous like earth, like muck. Leah swallowed again, felt her head lighten.
‘Isn’t the War Graves Commission going to identify him? Why call me?’
‘So many dead soldiers turn up every year – fifteen, twenty, twenty-five. We do our best, but if there are no regimental badges, no tags, no crucial bits of kit to go on, there just aren’t the resources to pursue it further,’ Peter explained.
‘He’ll get a nice burial, with a nice white cross, but they won’t know what name to put on it,’ said Ryan.
‘A nice burial?’ Leah echoed. ‘You’re too flippant, Ryan. You always were.’
‘I know. I’m impossible, right?’ He smiled cheerfully again; ever one to make light of something serious.
‘So … if there’s nothing to go on, how did you think I could help?’ Leah addressed the question to Peter.
‘Well—’ Peter began, but Ryan cut him off.
‘Don’t you want to meet him face to face? He’s remarkably well preserved – that end of the garden is waterlogged all year round, apparently – there’s a stream that runs along the bottom of it. Very pretty, by all accounts. Come on – not scared, are you? Of an archaeological find?’
‘Ryan, why must you be so …’ Leah gave up, didn’t finish the sentence. She tucked her hair behind her ears, folded her arms protectively across her chest, and walked around to the other side of the table.
The dead man’s face was rumpled slightly, as if he’d only lain down to sleep, pushing it resolutely into a pillow of broken ground. A crease in the lower cheek, running from eye socket to mouth. His top lip still described a long, elegant curve; a trace of stubble above it. His bottom lip and lower jaw dissolved into a scrambled mess that Leah could not look too closely at. His nose was also crushed, flattened, soft and gelatinous. It looked like she could reach out, cup her fingers, scoop it away completely. But his forehead, his eyes, were perfect. A lock of sodden hair fell forward, unruly; his brow was unlined, perhaps because of youth, perhaps because the skin was swollen, waterlogged. Handsome, he would have been. She could almost see it – could unfocus her eyes, blur away the terrible injuries, the wrong colour of his skin, the inhuman smell. And around each closed eye were tiny black lashes – each one separate, discernible, neatly lined up, as they should be. As they had been, the day he’d died almost a hundred years before. The lids had a faint silvery sheen, like meat left too long. Were they completely shut? Leah leaned towards him, frowned a little. Now it looked like they were slightly open. Just a little. Like some people’s remained when they slept, when they dreamed. She leaned closer, her own heartbeat loud above the whine of the lights. Could she see his eyes moving, behind the lids? Would the last thing he saw be there still? Tattooed accusingly onto his irises. She held her breath.