Louis de Bernières - The Dust That Falls From Dreams

Fairhead nodded, and said, ‘Go on.’

‘The thing is, I had thought of him as my husband since I was about, what? About twelve years old? We got engaged with a curtain ring. I promised I’d love him forever, even beyond death, and there’d never be anyone else, and, you know, how can I put it? It feels as though my heart is closed, and will always be closed. And there’s another thing.’

‘Yes?’

‘You know how important my faith is to me?’

‘How could I not? It puts mine to shame, in every way.’

‘Well, Daniel has no faith.’

‘He doesn’t not have faith. I mean, he’s an agnostic, not an atheist. He has perfectly defensible philosophical doubts. It would be strange not to, after such a terrible war. I’ve had some very interesting conversations with him.’

‘I don’t think I could live with someone who doesn’t share my faith.’

‘Did Ashbridge have faith like yours?’

Rosie blushed and looked a little horrified. At length she admitted, ‘I honestly don’t know. We never really talked about it much. He called it my “weakness”, and teased me about it. And back then, before the war, it wasn’t so important. We lived in a nice golden cocoon, didn’t we?’

‘Mmm, yes, it was lovely being Edwardian,’ said Fairhead. ‘That was our little golden age.’ He stood and looked down at her sympathetically. He picked the poker out of its stand and rattled at the coals in the grate. ‘Listen, my dear, you should not count very much on my advice. My certainties are really very small, when it comes down to it. But first of all come and look at the Bible with me, will you?’

They went into the morning room, and Fairhead turned to the Book of Romans. He loved the smell of the expensive slightly damp paper, and the elaborate red-and-gold illuminated lettering at the beginnings of the chapters.

‘Here it is,’ he said, pointing with his forefinger. ‘Read that.’

Rosie read: ‘“For the woman which hath an husband is bound by the law to her husband so long as he liveth; but if the husband be dead, she is loosed from the law of her husband.”’

She took this in, and then turned to look at him. ‘But I promised.’

‘Knowing him as I did, I’m prepared to bet that he told you to find happiness with another if he was killed.’

‘Yes, I think he did,’ confessed Rosie, ‘but I didn’t want to hear it, and now I think that maybe I didn’t. What I remember is the promise to love beyond death, forever.’

‘But of course you can love him forever. I’m certain you will. But you can’t love him as a husband when he’s dead. You know, life isn’t a romantic poem, Rosie. You’re alive here. We believe he is alive somewhere else. But this is where you must live.

‘And I must tell you what St John the Divine said. He said that God is love. He said that therefore anyone who loves is of God.

‘Now, Daniel loves his mother. He loves animals and children. When we go down to the Tarn he throws sticks for dogs he’s never met before, and he goes down on his knees to play clapping games with little ones, and lets them ride on his back while he pretends to be a horse. He loves your sisters, and Gaskell too, that’s plain. He loves your father. He loves his friends and his dead comrades, and he still loves his brothers and his father who died so long ago. He adores you, Rosie, it’s absolutely obvious, and it isn’t very much distempered by commonplace desire, as far as I can see. He doesn’t importune you, does he? Rosie, a man who loves so much and so liberally may not know God. But Daniel is of God. And if I were you I’d talk it over with Ottilie. She is much the wisest of us all, don’t you think?’

ON A COLD and windy day in late winter, not long after Rosie’s conversation with Fairhead, she and Daniel, muffled up in heavy coats and scarves, sat on a bench and looked out over the water. ‘Why do coots have white foreheads?’ asked Rosie.

‘Because they hope to join the Band of the Royal Marines,’ said Daniel. ‘And I have a question: why are moorhens called “moorhens” when they don’t live in moorland, and they aren’t hens?’

‘They got thrown off the moorlands at the time of the enclosures,’ said Rosie. ‘By wicked landlords.’

‘That must be it. What shall we do on Saturday evening?’

‘Let’s go and see the new Charlie Chaplin. Mama went to see it and hated it. She didn’t think it was funny at all, so I expect it’s hilarious. And on Sunday there’s a church parade of Boy Scouts going down Court Road, so I’m going to turn out and be appreciative. I expect you’ll be going to your mother’s on Sunday, won’t you?’

‘Yes, that’s the plan, but do let’s see the Chaplin on Saturday. You know, I never did join the Boy Scouts. I wanted to at first, because I always longed for a sheath knife. Then I got one anyway, so there was no longer any point. I could make dens and camps and cook up tins of beans any time I wanted, with Archie. Once we made a walkway that connected about six trees, fifteen feet up. I did have a copy of the Scouts’ Manual. It fell to bits from so much reading.’

‘It’s a pity the Pals got broken up, isn’t it?’ said Rosie. ‘Such a shame that your father died, and you had to move. It went very quiet after you and Archie left. No one flying over the wall any more like Sunny Jim, and staging fights with sticks, and making bows and arrows. It was such a lovely childhood, all of us in our little false paradise.’

‘It wasn’t false! That was real, and it all did happen. And you still had the Pendennis boys after we left.’

‘I know. But Ottilie did so love Archie, didn’t she? And I was terribly fond of you.’

‘Ash was the one, though.’

‘Yes, Ash was the one.’

‘Such a shame.’

There was the sound of people crying out, not fifty yards away, and the two of them were jerked out of their reminiscences. It appeared that a woman was getting very agitated on the bankside, and calling out to someone in the water. It was not a person, however.

‘There seems to be a dog stuck out in the water,’ said Daniel.

‘Oh dear, perhaps we’d better see if we can help.’

Daniel rose and ran the fifty yards. He saw that there was indeed a large black retriever in the water, apparently unable to keep itself up, and beginning to drown. A woman of about thirty, accompanied by a small boy, was calling, ‘Sheba! Sheba! Come on, girl! Come on! Oh, come on. Please come on! Swim! Swim!’

The little boy was in tears, and the woman was clearly desperate. Daniel bent down and untied the laces of his shoes, kicking them off. Then he removed his coat, jacket, shirt and socks but left his vest. The others watched him in amazement and hope. He sat on the bank and lowered himself into the water, exclaimed at the coldness of it, and struck out. The dog was fifteen yards out, and by now struggling so feebly that Daniel was only just in time to stop it going under altogether. ‘Come on, girl,’ he said, grabbing its collar and trying to work out how he was going to get it back to the bankside. There was no bottom beneath his feet, and that it made it all immeasurably difficult. The dog struggled hopelessly, and Daniel managed to get it almost onto his chest so that he could swim backwards with it. He felt so weighed down by the water in his trousers that he wondered whether he would make it back himself. At last his feet found the bottom, and he felt its horrible slimy mud squelching up between his toes. He picked the dog up and waded to the edge, depositing it on the bank, and scrambling out himself by holding onto a wooden post that had been driven in near the edge. As he came out he was overwhelmed by cold, made much worse by the sharp wind, and could not control either his shivering or the chattering of his teeth.