Andrew Williams - The Poison Tide

Wolff said thank you, and he supposed he was grateful. In the taxicab to Devonshire Place, he wondered why, and reasoned that it was probably natural to take pleasure in promotion even if he despised most of what he’d done to earn it. His apartment was clean, tidy, empty and soulless. Returning to it after so long, he felt like Mole in The Wind in the Willows , catching on the breeze the telegraphic current of the past, not happy times but thrilling ones. The housekeeper had folded Violet’s scarf and placed it on the arm of a couch. She must have left it the night he’d spent ashore from the ship, just a few months — or was it weeks? — before she’d become the Honourable Mrs Lewis. Lieutenant Snow had seen to his luggage and it arrived within the hour. He didn’t unpack: he was sick of the closeness of the old city already.

First thing the following morning he sent a telegram to his mother, then took a taxicab to King’s Cross. Rumbling north felt like a journey through his life, a familiar roll call of stations and memories, home on leave from the sea, undergraduate outings at Cambridge, and school visits to Ely, the ship of the Fens, its lantern tower brilliant in the July sunshine. At King’s Lynn Station he paid a cab to drive him the last few miles across the Great Ouse into the open Lincolnshire farmland, drained and settled by the Dutch for centuries and more recently by his own family. Hamlets, isolated farms and the breeze from the Wash shaking the hip-high barley and wheat, still a few weeks from harvest. Above all, a vast tent of sky: wondrous as a boy, wondrous still. He thought perhaps that something of him had been shaped by its moods, its emptiness, its deep summer blues and angry winter greys, the shifting chiaroscuro of the Fens, clouds scattering and amassing in infinite variations, like a great unfinished symphony.

The farm was a mile from the village of Gedney, a large but undistinguished red-brick house and three low barns sheltered by trees. His grandfather had purchased the land with money he’d earned as a merchant captain with the Netherlands Steamship Company. It was the old man who’d taken him to school every day, rising before six to harness the horse and chaise.

The cab dropped him at the gate and he carried, half dragged his bags to the farmhouse. His mother discovered him bent double on the step.

‘Trying to catch my breath,’ he gasped.

She gave him a quiet smile of welcome and he rose to kiss her cheek.

‘You look older, Sebastian,’ she observed with characteristic bluntness. ‘Are you unwell?’

‘I’m getting better.’

She nodded. ‘You look more like your father.’

She led him into the kitchen and he sat at the old oak table as she prepared their supper of boiled ham and potatoes. I’m older but she’s just the same, he thought, as he watched her at the range, her grey hair — had it ever been anything else? — swept severely off her face in a bun, small like a chapel mouse but spirited, and sometimes fierce. A practical woman, strong, she liked to say, in the knowledge that Christ was her sword and shield. While she peeled and chopped and stirred he spoke of New York skyscrapers and the Statue of Liberty. As always, she listened with mild curiosity but asked no questions. ‘I don’t want you lie to me,’ she’d explained once.

Later, she talked of the farm and how hard it was becoming to work with the young men away. The Baker boys had gone and John Vickers from Gedney Marsh, she said, and the Kidbys of Green Dyke had lost their eldest son already. It was a sin, and she’d told the minister so after chapel. ‘“Stop preaching nonsense,” I said — my goodness, it was there on the wall above his head — “Thou Shalt Not Kill”.’

She made Wolff say grace before supper and after it they wandered the farm together, the sun dipping into the barley. ‘Will you stay for harvest?’ she asked. He said he’d try to.

‘It’s a good life here, you know. A good Christian life.’ She sounded sad, perhaps because she knew it didn’t mean as much to him as she’d always hoped it would. ‘We must hold on to that in these times.’

They stopped at the eastern edge, beyond it the old sea bank and the salt marsh stretching out to the Wash. Above them, an exaltation of larks chirruping gladly, a sound that always conjured this place for him.

‘It’s harder for clever people to be happy — sometimes it’s a curse,’ she said suddenly. ‘I used to say that to your father. Do you have a lady friend?’

‘There was someone for a time. She decided she didn’t like me.’

‘Was she a good woman?’

‘Yes.’

‘She might change her mind. Perhaps you’ll persuade her.’

‘Perhaps — one day.’

‘Or there’ll be someone else.’ She threaded a grey hair behind her ear. ‘Goodness, after this war there’ll be plenty of women to choose from.’ Then, pointedly, ‘You’ll be forty soon.’

He turned away from her to gaze out to the darkening sea. Is she lonely? he wondered. Perhaps she was worried about the future of the farm, the comfort of family, and grandchildren in old age. But if she wanted those things, she wouldn’t say so.

There was no electricity at the farmhouse but she lit the oil lamp he’d always used and carried it up to his bedroom. Everything was how he’d left it when he went up to Cambridge. There was almost nothing to change. Black cross on whitewashed wall, a few sticks of homely furniture, a single bed and a shelf of books. He picked up a favourite his grandfather had given him as a boy, its spine broken by over-eager young hands. It told of the voyages of famous Lincolnshire explorers, Flinders, Franklin and Bass, and Vancouver from King’s Lynn. They had played their part in nurturing his restless spirit.

Over the next days, he rose early and rolled up his sleeves to repair fences and clear ditches, climbing up on the old barn to replace the broken tiles. In the afternoons he wandered through green lanes choked with kingcups and cow parsley, skirting fat wheatfields and striking across the old salt pans to the sea. Striding home late one evening, the sound of a tolling bell rolling across the fen from the tower at Gedney touched him deeply. Sempiternal, mysterious in childhood when death was so confusing — especially his father’s — it was now an affecting reminder of the war and the poems White had read to him in hospital of ploughboys who would never grow old.

‘Say a prayer for John Vickers,’ his mother said, as she was readying his lamp a few hours later. ‘He was only nineteen. He shouldn’t have gone. He wasn’t the sort to be a soldier.’

The following day Wolff rode the old cob into the village and ordered the newspapers. ‘Do you want to know?’ he asked his mother, spreading them on the kitchen table.

‘Is it bad?’

‘ The Times is calling it the Battle of the Somme. It says: fighting intense — another day of spectacular gains — relentless advance. I don’t know,’ he paused, ‘but I’m sure the correspondent doesn’t either.’

There was a report that troubled him more, although he didn’t speak of it to his mother. Somewhere on all the front pages was a column or so for Casement. His friends were seeking a reprieve but most of the newspapers were determined he should hang. To be sure they carried the public with them, they were blackening his name.

‘Are you all right?’ his mother enquired.

‘Yes. Fine,’ he said, ‘fine. I think I’ll chop that wood in the stable.’

‘Don’t exhaust yourself.’

Swinging the axe with all his strength, splintering the log in two, and again in four, and another, and another, full of rage and disgust at the cruelty. C had known, of course. ‘They’re going to hang him,’ he’d said with certainty. He’d known that the police were ready to tighten the noose. Wolff could recall the distaste in his voice when he spoke of Casement’s ‘proclivities’. Whitehall was intent on a double death, trying him for treason, then again in the press for immorality, on the front page, forcing the stories of soldiers dying on the Somme inside.