The Winter Ghosts, Page 2

  I strolled through a pretty garden, bleak in winter, which perfectly matched my mood. I paused, as I always did, at the memorial raised in honour of those who had fallen on the battlefields of Ypres and Mons and Verdun. Even in Tarascon, far from the theatre of war, there were so many names set down in stone. So very many names.

  Just behind the monument, a corridor of gaunt fir and black pine led to the wrought-iron gate of the cemetery. The stone tips of carved angels’ wings, Christian crosses and the peaks of one or two more elaborate tombs were just visible above the high walls. I hesitated, tempted to visit the sleepers in the damp earth, but resisted the impulse. I knew better than to linger among the dead. I started to turn away.

  But I was too slow. I saw him. For a fraction of a second, a shadow in the diminishing light or a trick of my unreliable eyes, I saw him standing on the shallow old stone steps directly ahead of me. I felt a jolt of happiness and raised my hand to wave. Like the old days.

  ‘George?’

  His name dropped into the silent air. Then I felt my ribs tighten a notch, cracking like the tired winding mechanism on our old grandfather clock, and my arm fell back to my side in despair.

  There was nobody there. There never would be.

  I pushed my hands deep into the pockets of my overcoat as the bell in the cloche-mur struck four, the notes echoing away into nothing in the damp air. In those days, the truth was that though I feared to see him, I grieved when he did not come. And when he did, I felt a rush of joy, elation, and for a moment was able to believe he was still alive. That it had all been a stupid mistake.

  Then I would remember and my haggard heart would fold in upon itself once more.

  ‘George,’ I whispered, knowing there would be no answer.

  I slumped down on the ledge of the memorial. As I leaned against the stone for support, I was conscious of the names of the dead pressing against my back as if they were engraving themselves on my skin.

  The familiar image of a photograph slipped into my mind. Once it had sat on the sideboard at home in a tortoiseshell frame. Now I carried it loose in the bottom of my suitcase. Taken in September 1914, it was fixed in the sepia tones of the past. Mother sat in the centre of the photograph, beautiful and remote in her high-necked blouse and brooch. Standing behind her, Father on one side and George on the other, proud in his uniform. The garter badge and Roussillon plume gleamed on his cap. Captain George Watson, Royal Sussex Regiment, 39th Division.

  I am sitting a little apart from the tableau, an awkward adolescent of thirteen. My hair is lying not quite flat. At the moment the shutter clicked, something made me turn away from the camera and towards George. Over the years I have examined and re-examined the photograph, trying to read the expression in my eyes. Is it his reassurance I am seeking, his admiration? Or is it rather a child’s impotent anger at being made to collude in such a charade? I don’t know. However many times I stare at that dusty, captured moment and try to remember what was going through my mind, I can’t.

  Two days later, George was sent to join the 13th Battalion in France. I do recall how proud Father was, how boastful Mother, and how full of dread was I. Crippling, overpowering dread. Even then, I knew that road would not lead to glory.

  How long did I sit there on that cold winter seat in Tarascon, the chill seeping through the heavy fabric of my coat and tweeds? Time stretches and shrinks, does not stay fixed when we most need it to. I thought of my parents, distant and uninterested. Of George, of all those who had died, becoming less defined as the years went by. The simple truth was that I was burdened by my life and the fact of George’s death.

  With hindsight, I see that all these emotions assaulted me simultaneously. Delusion and hope and longing, all tumbling one after the other like a falling line of dominoes. It was, after all, a path well-worn. A decade of mourning leaves its footprints on the heart.

  Finally, I pulled myself together and moved on, grateful for the darkness. I stopped a while at the church and attempted to decipher the handwritten notice set outside on the wall, forcing myself to concentrate on the words. It appeared that the name - La Daurade - was derived from ‘daurado’ in the local language, which meant ‘golden one’ or ‘gilded one’, and referred to a statue of the Virgin that had once been housed within the church. I tried to ignite a spark of interest, if nothing else out of respect for my previous, short-lived employment in a firm of ecclesiastical architects. But in truth, I felt nothing. And my thoughts insisted on spiralling back to the dead sleeping in the cold earth. Shattered bones and mud and blood. The headstones and the graves, the wild and untended places between.

  I shook my head. I didn’t want to be haunted by images of George’s final hours, of barbed wire, limbs tangled and trapped and torn. I did not want to hear the crump of the guns or the screams of men and horses brought down in a hail of bullets or a cloud of gas or the sudden wrenching away of the ground beneath their feet.

  The trouble was that I knew both too much and too little. After ten years of trying to find out what had happened to George in 1916, I had armed myself only with possibilities of what might have been. Rather than helping me to accept and to move on, that ugly, violent knowledge had been the undoing of me.

  Again, I tried to think about other things. I looked up at the beauty of the church, the pleasing symmetry and gentle detail of stone, and I wished, as I had so often before, that these fragments of history had the power to move me as once they had. My fingers, stiff in my leather gloves, slipped to the Penguin score of Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 3 in the pocket of my coat. An investment of two shillings and sixpence, this, too, an attempt to remind me of what I had once valued so highly. But music, like everything else, had lost its charm. I was no longer moved by Vaughan Williams’s soaring cadenzas or Elgar’s falling sevenths, any more than I was by the sight of white apple blossom in March, or the vivid yellow of broom in the hedgerows in April, or a haze of bluebells in a wood in May. Nothing touched me. Everything had ceased to matter on the day the telegram arrived: MISSING IN ACTION. PRESUMED DEAD.

  I continued my solitary circuit, walking through the place des Consuls, careless of the cold that made my ears ache. There was the occasional rattle of a plate or a cup from behind shuttered windows, the intermittent burst of conversation or the crackle of a wireless. But mostly I was alone, with only the sound of my boots on the cobbled stones for company.

  I followed the winding steps through the old quarter and climbed up to the foot of the Tour du Castella, the thin tower I’d noticed when I drove into Tarascon. From this vantage point, I could see the timeless peaks of the Pyrenees surrounding the town like a ring of stone. On the horizon was the summit of the Roc de Sédour, the snow on its peak a ghostly white against the black sky. To the south, the river gorge of the Vicdessos.

  In the quartier Saint-Roch, the lights from the Chateau Piquemal sparkled like the illuminations on the pier at Bognor Regis. The avenue de Sabart was lined with allotments and cabanes for the market gardeners, jostling for position with the houses that had sprung up like weeds in the quartier de la Gare. And in the mouth of the southern tip of the valley, the new factory buildings sat long and flat and squat, modern gatekeepers to the older rhythms of the mountains, reminding me of the greenhouses in the walled garden at my childhood home.

  Clouds of white smoke belched from the chimneys, shot through with eerie blue or green or yellow tints from the metals they consumed. Aluminium, cobalt, copper. And in the air the smell of burning, the scent of industry. Of time marching on.

  It was not possible to get inside the Tour du Castella. A small door was nailed shut, and halfway up was a blind window with a black grille across it. The weeds grew wild around the base. The grey stone was covered with moss and lichen.

  Its position was vertiginous enough, though. The ground surrounding it dropped sharply away. There was no barrier or handrail, nothing to stop the intrepid traveller who had climbed this far from slipping or stepping out.

>   As I looked down, I felt suddenly dizzy, from the cold, the narrowness of the ledge around the foot of the tower. The vast sense of space and dusk. For an instant, I thought of how easy it would be to finish things now. To close my eyes and step out into the gentle sky. Feel nothing but air as I fell down, down into the foaming waters of the Ariège below. I thought of the revolver in my portmanteau, hidden beneath my Fair Isle slipover, a match to George’s old service Webley that I’d not been able to bring myself to use.

  I had acquired the weapon in a rare moment of purpose six years ago, just before the mental collapse that had seen me confined for some months to a sanatorium. Hurrying down a Dickensian alley in the East End of London that was black with soot, the air rank with resignation, I’d made my way to an address slipped to me by one of George’s fellow officers. Simpson was a ruin of a man, drinking himself to death to escape the shame of being the only one to have made it back. So he understood, better than most, the importance of a quick and easy solution to things should the burden of living become too much. I bought that particular revolver knowing George had owned one, and, for a while, the possession of it had given me courage. But I’d funked it. I had never fired the gun. Never even loaded it.

  At that instant, standing at the foot of the tower on the top of the precipitous hill in Tarascon, I felt a rush of blood to the head at the thought that perhaps the moment finally had come. Elation at the possibility of decisive action. Of joining George. But only for an instant. Then, as at every other time, the impulse slunk away with its tail between its legs. I stepped back from the ledge. Felt the safety of the stone at my back, my hands flat against the brick.

  A few minutes passed until my head stopped spinning. Then I turned and descended the wide, shallow steps that led down from the mound to the streets below. Was it courage or cowardice that stopped me? Still I cannot say. Even now, I find it hard to tell those impostors one from the other.

  Later, after a modest dinner in the restaurant opposite the hotel, unwilling to be alone with my thoughts, I sought out a bar in the Faubourg Sainte-Quitterie where men were prepared to accept without question a stranger into their company.

  Their rough voices spoke with pride of the future of Tarascon. And as I raised a glass to the prosperity of the town, I did understand this need to move forward, to forget. How, with drums and penny whistles, the world marched on. Such swaggering industry boasted to travellers and citizens alike that there was a future there for the taking, not just tawdry memories. That the ruined landscapes of Flanders should be allowed to fade from memory. Honour the dead, yes. Remember, yes, but fare forward. Look to tomorrow. Jazz and girls with bobbed hair and those chic, false new buildings in Piccadilly. Pretend that it had all been worth it.

  As the evening staggered on in a haze of red wine and strong tobacco, I have a recollection that I tried to tell my drinking companions how, in ten years, I had not learned to forget. How electric signs and teeming carriageways could not drown out the voices of those who had been lost. How the beloved dead were always there, glimpsed out of the corner of the eye. At one’s side.

  But my schoolboy French meant they were spared my philosophising and besides, for all its rituals, grief is a solitary business. So the evening ended with the shaking of hands, the slap on the back. Companionship, certainly, but precious little communication.

  When finally I found my bed, I was restless and wakeful. The tolling of the single bell marked the passing hours of the night. Not until the pale dawn crept through the wooden slats of the shutters did I, at last, fall into a deep and heavy sleep.

  I tell you about that evening in such detail, Saurat, not because I cared so very much about this particular town. It could have been any one of a hundred places in that corner of southern France. But it is important to recount every ordinary minute so you understand that nothing about that night in Tarascon could be seen as the harbinger of what was to come. I staggered between remembrance and maudlin self-pity, which was how it was in those days. On other nights, things had been worse, and they had been better. I occupied an emotional no-man’s-land, neither moving forward, nor moving back.

  But although I did not yet know it, the watcher in the hills had me in her sights. She was already there. Waiting, for me.

  On The Mountain Road to Vicdessos

  In the darkest days of my confinement in the sanatorium, then during my convalescence at home in Sussex, dawn was the part of the day I dreaded most. It was in those early hours that the barrenness of my existence seemed most starkly at odds with the waking world around me. The blue of the sky, the silver underside of the leaves on trees coming back to life in the spring, celandine and cow parsley in the hedgerows, all appeared to mock my dull spirits.

  Looking back, the reason for my breakdown was perfectly straightforward, though it did not seem so at the time. To those around me, to my parents certainly, it was peculiar - in bad taste, almost - to have waited so long before going to pieces. It was not until six years after George’s death that my battered mind gave up the fight, though in truth it had been a steady deterioration.

  We were at a restaurant not far from Fortnum & Mason’s to celebrate a. my twenty-first birthday. I can still remember the taste of the Montebello 1915 champagne on my tongue, the same vintage, as it happens, Fortnum’s had provided for the Everest expedition that year. But as we sat there in a brittle silence, Father and Mother and I, George was a shadow at our table. It was his presence that had made us a family. He had been the glue. Without him, we were three strangers with nothing to say. And here I was, the other son, sipping champagne and opening gifts, when George had never even reached his majority. It was wrong.

  All wrong.

  Was I the elder brother now, having lived longer than George? Had we exchanged places? Such thoughts, becoming ever more heated, spun round and round in my mind. The waiters glided past us in black and white. The bubbles of the champagne scratched at the back of my throat. The clatter of cutlery grated on my nerves.

  ‘Do make an effort, Frederick,’ my mother snapped. ‘Do at least pretend to be enjoying yourself, even if you are not.’

  ‘Leave the boy alone,’ my father growled, but he waved away the offer of a second bottle of Montebello.

  All I could think about were birthdays past, when George had made me laugh and brought me presents and transformed an ordinary day into something special. A red and white top when I was five. A bow and arrow at nine. His final gift to me, a first edition of Captain Scott’s The Voyage of the Discovery Vol I, with its blue embossed board cover, sent from France in December 1915, tied up in brown paper and string.

  That was it. The memory of that book. Having fought the truth of his death for six years, I gave in. There, in that plush and velvet restaurant, my mind came undone. Everything started to unravel. I remember how I put down my champagne flute carefully, deliberately, on the table in front of me, but after that, almost nothing. Did I weep? Did I disturb the fossilised ladies and military veterans by raising my voice or rolling my eyes? By breaking the porcelain or some other such pantomime? I can’t recall. Just the comforting haze of the morphine and the snow falling on London and the rattling journey by car as I was taken from Piccadilly to a private hospital outside Midhurst.

  In the sanatorium, Christmas and the New Year of 1923 came and went without me. Only when spring came and the mistle thrush outside my window began its fluty song, did the world shyly come back into focus. An hour a day, walking up and down in the airing court accompanied by two starched nurses, then only one. Then, outings that lasted a little longer and were undertaken alone, until, at the end of April, the doctors considered I was strong enough to be released into my family’s care.

  I was sent home. Father was ashamed of my lack of backbone, and was rarely there. Mother was no more interested in me now I was an invalid than she had been prior to my collapse. These days, I understand where her antipathy originated. I feel some pity for her. Having provided my father with a son, s
he had found herself obliged to go through the whole business again five years later when she’d thought all that kind of thing was over. At the time, when I was growing up, I just took it as read that there was something unlikeable about me and tried not to care too much about it.

  Nonetheless, during the summer and autumn of that year, I recovered. But each tiny improvement in my health took me further from George, and in truth, his remained the only company I wished for. It felt like a betrayal to learn to live without him.

  Life went on at its steady pace. The shadow cast by the War grew weaker. All those months and years, sliding by, one much like the other. And still, despair at the break of another dawn. Each morning, as light gave back shape to the futile world, a stark reminder of how much I had lost.

  But in the Grand Hôtel de la Poste in Tarascon, at the fag end of 1928, I woke at ten o’clock, having slept right through the early-morning horrors, and without a weight pressing down upon my chest. I flexed my fingers, my shoulders, my arms, feeling them as a part of me, not something separate. Not something dead.

  Again it is possible that it is only with hindsight that my thawing emotions are evident. Or that, having stepped back from the edge that previous evening, I see there had been some significant change in me. But I want to remember that I rose from my bed with a certain energy. Outside in the street, I could hear a girl singing. A folk song, or some tune of the mountains, which touched me by its simplicity. I flung wide the shutters, experiencing the snap of cold air on my arms, and felt, if not precisely happy, then at least not unhappy.

  Did I smile down at the girl? Or did she, aware of my scrutiny, look up at me? I cannot recall, only that the old-fashioned melody seemed to hang heavy in the air long after she had stopped singing.