Louis de Bernières - The Dust That Falls From Dreams

Under the Bramley Sophie was covering Captain Fairhead’s face with bold kisses, and he was entering into a kind of delirium, that strange elation brought about by the impossible becoming the inevitable.

Later on, sitting side by side in the conservatory in the semi-darkness, Sophie said, ‘I love this time of day.’

‘You enjoy a little crepuscule.’

‘Oh, very much. Do you know, dear, that when you first started coming here we all thought you were after Rosie?’

‘I’m very fond of Rosie. I can quite see why Ash adored her, but she’s really not quite my type.’

Sophie raised an eyebrow.

‘I know this will sound strange, coming from me, but she’s just a bit too religious. I find that kind of absolute and uncompromising faith a little hard to take. I keep wanting to say “but … but …” Do you know what I’m getting at?’

‘You mean she’s a fanatic?’

‘I wouldn’t be as hard as that. I just don’t think it’s normal, somehow, not to have any doubts. After what we’ve been through.’

‘I do know what you mean,’ said Sophie. ‘I think it’s a bit peculiar. She’s always been like that, though. Don’t tell anyone, but she keeps a madonna wrapped up and hidden under her bed. And she’s got a rosary. She thinks we don’t know. Well, Mama doesn’t. We wouldn’t tell her, of course. Imagine the fuss she’d make. Quite a hoo-ha.’

‘One thing that doesn’t seem to fit is her passion for modern poetry. It doesn’t go with being religious in such an old-fashioned manner.’

‘Wasn’t Christina Rossetti something of a religious fanatic?’

‘Almost morbidly so, I’d say. If a priest is allowed to say such a thing.’

‘It seems unseemly. Anyway, the thing about people is that they are all inexhaustibly peculiar. Apart from me.’

‘Well, my darling, it wasn’t her I fell in love with. It wasn’t her keeping me awake at night because I couldn’t stop thinking about her.’

She took his hand and squeezed it.

‘After we’re married, do you think I should stay in the army?’ asked Fairhead.

‘Do you still have enough faith?’

‘I have a vocation. It’s a different thing, but it has the same way of leaving one without choices.’ He paused, and then broke the silence by saying, ‘Besides, we’re never going to be rich. That’s one thing I can promise. No servants for us.’

‘Servants are so Parsee these days,’ said Sophie. ‘I couldn’t bear to be unfashionable. Before the war this place was so cluttered with servants you could hardly avoid falling over them. It’s so much more peaceful now.’

‘The word is “passé”,’ said Fairhead automatically, and Sophie smiled to herself.

IT WAS ONLY the third time that Daniel had called by, and he had not yet rung the bell because a rowdy game of British bulldog was going on in the street, and he was watching it with fond memories of his own schooldays. A posse of ragged urchins had wandered up from Mottingham, and were using the pavements as Home, and the road as their battlefield. It had begun because one of them had found a tennis ball that must have come over the wall of one of the wealthy houses, and a tennis ball was exactly what one needed to start a game of British bulldog.

The children had stood with their legs wide apart in a big circle in the middle of the street, and the ball had been tossed into their midst. It went through the legs of a little girl wearing a crushed bonnet on her head, and much grime on her face, and so she was ‘it’.

To cries of ‘British Bulldog, one, two, three!’ a magnificent hurly-burly of rushing, grabbing and throwing to the ground began, in which knees got grazed, noses bled and torn clothes were rent yet further. The little girl had managed to catch a tall child with a wall eye, and the two of them had caught two more, until at last there was only one very fast girl left, who had no chance against twelve bulldogs all in a line.

She became the first bulldog of the next game, and was standing in the middle of the road ready to begin when a new AC Six hove into view. Its driver was wearing an expensive herringbone tweed coat, goggles and a deerstalker hat, and was clearly neither skilful nor experienced. The car lurched and staggered as he crashed it into the wrong gear and pressed down on the accelerator too much or too little. Daniel and the children watched it with fascination, and the fast girl who was the new bulldog ran quickly to join her friends.

Just as the vehicle was about to pass, it swerved out, and then back again, mounting the kerb and sending two children spinning into the wall of The Grampians. The crack of a head hitting the wall was clearly audible above the screaming and the belated sound of the motor’s klaxon. The children began to wail and panic, running about and crashing into each other. The AC came to a halt twenty yards up the street, and the driver merely sat there, blinking and muttering. The car began to roll slowly backwards, and Daniel ran forward, leapt into it and engaged the handbrake.

The screaming had caused many doors to open, and, running back, Daniel saw Rosie and Ottilie coming out onto the steps of their house. He waved at them to come down.

The two women dealt with the children as best they could, fortunate to have had those years of nursing behind them. Daniel ran indoors to call Dr Scott and an ambulance, and then ran out again. He instructed the children to fetch mothers and fathers, anyone to whom the injured children might belong, and they scattered in the direction of Mottingham, like a small flock of ragged birds.

It was at this point that the driver of the car clambered out. Unsteadily he went round to the nearside and inspected the bumper. When Daniel realised that he could do nothing for the broken children that the sisters were not already doing, he came up beside the driver. The latter gestured towards the bumper. ‘Damned shame,’ he said. ‘I’ll have to get it straightened. Only had the damned thing for two weeks, and it’s dented already.’ He pulled a fox hunter’s pocket flask from his coat, took a swig and offered it to Daniel.

Daniel waved a hand in astonished refusal. The driver was a man in his forties, portly and prosperous, with the red-veined face and watery eyes of a drunk. Once he had evidently been handsome and virile, but he had clearly been unmanned by alcohol for quite some time.

‘Come with me,’ said Daniel, taking his arm.

‘Steady, old boy,’ said the drunk, as Daniel frogmarched him down to where the injured children lay.

‘I’m making a citizen’s arrest,’ said Daniel. ‘You do as I bloody well tell you, or I swear I’ll break your neck.’

Rosie looked up with tears in her eyes. ‘I don’t think this one’ll live,’ she said. Daniel looked down at the cracked skull that was oddly flattened on one side, with its caking of dark blood in the blond hair. He was a beautiful little boy, despite the dirt and poverty that had been his lot, and was no more than six years old. Tears flowed down his cheeks from bright speedwell-blue eyes that stared at nothing, and his mouth worked silently.

The little boy that Ottilie was tending was lying flat on his back, howling with pain, his fierce sobs seeming to echo from the walls of the houses. ‘Both legs broken,’ said Ottilie, when Daniel leaned down. ‘I don’t know if they’ll ever be straight.’

Daniel turned to the drunk and said fiercely, ‘One child dead and one maimed. Are you proud of yourself?’

‘Damned little hobbledehoys, fourpence a dozen. Would have grown up thieves. What about my bumper? That’s what I want to know. Doubt if I can get their mothers to pay for it. Probably haven’t got fathers. Too many damned brats, anyway.’