Sarah Rayne - What Lies Beneath

‘Does that bother you?’ said Gil, finally looking up from his newspaper.

‘It does, a bit.’

‘But not enough to alter things?’

‘No. It’s because of everything we saw and experienced in Edirne,’ said Crispian. ‘Not only what was done to Jamie, but the rest of it. All those months of people dying and starving. The sheer bloody waste of human life. It’s a – a deep feeling. And yet…’

‘Yes?’

‘And yet I know this is what’s called a just war,’ he said. ‘I know it’s one that has to be fought – and it’s certainly one that has to be won.’

‘And you’re having trouble reconciling those two feelings?’ said Gil, putting the newspaper aside.

‘Yes.’

‘Yes, I see that. But if you could fight it in another way,’ said Gil, thoughtfully, ‘would you do so?’

‘I think so. Yes, of course I would.’

‘Even if it meant going to France? Belgium? Being in the thick of the actual fighting?’

‘Yes,’ said Crispian again.

‘What about Cadences? Finance is a part of war, isn’t it? Wouldn’t you be needed there?’

‘It runs itself,’ said Crispian. ‘Well, there’s a good Board of Directors. Why?’

‘The government needs medical help,’ said Gil. ‘They’re already trying to recruit people through Guy’s Hospital. And the Red Cross organization wants volunteers – they’re joining forces with the Order of St John. How would you feel about becoming part of that?’

‘But I haven’t any medical training,’ said Crispian.

‘If we’re being accurate, I’ve only got three-quarters,’ said Gil. ‘I never qualified. But I’m going to see if they’ll take me in one of the medical corps, although I don’t know yet in what capacity.’ He leaned forward, his expression for once serious. ‘Crispian, if I could get you in with me, would you do it?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Crispian. ‘Could it be done? And would I be of any use?’

‘God, yes. The Red Cross have already said they need untrained people to man first-aid posts and provide transport. There’s talk of motorized ambulances on the actual battlefields – you can drive.’

‘Well, after a fashion.’

‘Please come with me,’ said Gil, and for the first time his voice was stripped of the flippances and the mocking edge. ‘Crispian, please,’ he said.

Crispian stared at him. ‘Yes,’ he said at last. ‘Yes, all right.’

After Crispian went away, not to fight, but to act as some kind of medical assistant, people jeered at Serena if she went out, and shouted that her son was a coward. She refused to let anyone see how upset and humiliated she was, but once, on one of her very rare outings through the lanes (Flagg had learned to drive out of sheer necessity), a group of women stood in the road, barring their way.

‘Where’s your son?’ they shouted. ‘Not fighting the Hun, is he? Not like the rest of the men.’

‘Coward,’ yelled another. ‘Husband and brother and two sons, I had, and all of them dead save my youngest and he’s left a leg in France.’

‘We sacrificed our men to the war,’ cried the first. ‘What have you sacrificed?’ She darted forward and thrust a handful of something through the grille of the car.

Serena said, ‘Flagg, what…?’

‘White feathers,’ said Flagg. ‘But pay them no attention, madam, for they don’t know the truth of it, as we do. Mr Crispian’s fully as brave as anyone, going onto the battlefields like he does, bringing the wounded men out.’

‘Drive on,’ said Serena stiffly. ‘Drive round them.’ She had been determined to remain seated upright, but as they went around the women she shrank involuntarily into the car’s dim safe interior, putting up a hand to shield her face. There was a hot lump of angry misery in her throat but she would not cry – she would not – purely because a few ignorant angry village woman had shouted at her. She knew the truth about her son, and that was all that mattered.

As if to balance things out, when she got back, there was a letter from Crispian, which the post had just delivered. Serena was pleased to hear from him, even though the letter was a scrappy one. But it said he was cheerful and well, and that he hoped he might get leave very soon, and he was looking forward to some of Mrs Flagg’s cooking after the meagre rations he was getting.

Hetty and Dora thought it ever so romantic that Mr Crispian was coming home, although Hetty thought he ought to be fighting properly. Bandaging people up was not real war, she said, and was told very sharply by Mr Flagg to hold her tongue.

‘You don’t know what you’re talking about,’ he said. ‘It takes a deal of courage to go onto a battlefield and carry off wounded men.’

Mrs Flagg said she supposed Hetty would have let the poor men lie there like animals, dying in the heathen mud.

‘Madam read the letter out to me,’ said Flagg. ‘I think it was a comfort to her to get it after those stupid women screaming at her in the lane. I’d have to say, though, that the letter didn’t tell much, not really.’

‘They censor letters from France,’ said Hetty, who had walked out with a soldier for a few weeks before he went back to the front.

‘Mr Crispian said it was difficult to write clearly because the billet – the place where he was sleeping – wasn’t very well lit,’ said Flagg. ‘Sad that, I thought.’

‘We’ll light every lamp in the house for him when he comes home,’ promised Mrs Flagg.

There was never much light inside the small Red Cross post and even on the first day of July only a smeary greyness trickled in. Crispian thought it was as if all the mud and the suffering and the despair had leaked into the whole landscape. At times, struggling to help men who had been shot or wounded from shellfire – helping to carry stretchers, sometimes driving one of the battered motorized ambulances – he had time to think that he had wanted to avoid violence, yet was now in the middle of a violence he could not have imagined.

But the day was starting and it had to be faced, and he thought he would get dressed and go in search of a cup of tea; there was generally a large urn simmering over somebody’s fire. He was pulling on his shoes when there was a movement from the bed.

‘I thought you were still asleep,’ said Crispian.

‘No. I was watching you. I like watching you get dressed. You’re so neat and graceful. You looked sad, though,’ said Gil. ‘What were you thinking?’

‘Oh, how similar all war is when you get down to it. The stench of gangrenous wounds, the lack of sanitation.’

‘Dysentery and overflowing latrines, and stale cooking and cordite,’ said Gil. ‘Oh, and that awful stuff they use to sluice down the trenches – chloride of lime. And before much longer there’ll be the stench of rotting carcasses. They won’t be able to bury a quarter of them until all this is over. Do you ever regret accompanying me, Crispian?’

Crispian looked at Gil for a moment. His hair, which needed cutting, was tousled on the pillow like spun floss, and it was probably several weeks since he had been able to shave.

‘I don’t regret any of it,’ he said.

He did not. Nor had he ever regretted what had happened between them on the night they reached the first Red Cross post. They had been in France for only a few weeks – the Red Cross was still setting up first-aid posts near to what would become the ravaged battlefields along the Somme – but Gil had tapped lightly at his door late one night and asked to come in. Crispian had been deeply apprehensive about what the war was going to mean, and when he left England there had been jeers and accusations of cowardice because he had not volunteered for active service. On that night he had been homesick and in a highly emotional state, and it had been the night he stopped fighting Gil, finally and for always.