Owen Sheers - The Dust Diaries

She had not aged in the same way Pruen had. He remembered her clearly now from that night in Salisbury. When he was so new to the country, to its heat and its people. Her face had kept its shape. Age had not obscured the younger woman, but somehow enhanced her. She seemed larger here, not just physically, but in her character. More confident. He couldn’t be sure but he thought she was wearing exactly the same red dress she wore that night fourteen years ago. Dulled and thin at the elbows, but the same dress. She wore her hair in a loose bun, the brown stitched with grey, and she had developed the white African’s characteristic crow’s feet about her eyes, the mark of years spent squinting in the sun.

‘I was just going outside, will you join me?’ she said, picking up her bucket. She walked towards the end of the tent and he followed her, surprised by the scent of perfume as she passed.

Outside, Mrs Cole sat on an upturned crate facing out towards the lake. Arthur joined her. She lit a cigarette from a silver case and he lit his pipe. Together they smoked and looked out over the water, the morning mist still hanging at its centre, and at the distant crowds of flamingos gathered further along the shore. They brought each other up to date with their lives. He told her of his move to Maronda Mashanu, his decision to stay on in Africa, about his schools and his church in the south. She in turn explained why she was there, at the lake. How she had felt she had to do something, had to be involved in the war in some way. Salisbury, like most of the colonies, was apathetic towards the war. Many of the white settlers felt that it was not theirs to fight, that the British army was more an army of invasion than an army of protection. But her daughter Anne was still in England, and her letters made her feel closer to the conflict, to the struggle and the loss of it. When Anne wrote describing a daylight air raid on London, of coming out from the shelter of a department store to see a mother and child impaled on the railings, she knew she could no longer stay at home in Salisbury. She had to be involved. So she travelled to Nairobi and presented herself at the army HQ. She didn’t leave until they gave her a post as a nurse.

‘And Mr Cole? Was he happy with your decision?’

She smiled and blew out a long plume of thin smoke. ‘You never met him, did you? He wasn’t at the dinner as I remember?’

‘No, he was away. At the war in the south.’

‘Yes, well, as you can imagine, he was pretty keen for this one too. The day after the news came through he was off to volunteer. Doing his duty. Not that he ever did much else.’

She stopped, took another pull on her cigarette. ‘He was killed at Tanga. That first attack. Apparently he was covered in bee stings. Head to toe. But he’d been shot too, in the legs. They don’t know which killed him.’

‘I’m sorry to hear that. Very sorry. God rest his soul.’

‘Oh, if he’s anywhere near God there won’t be much resting, believe me — he’ll be sorting through his ledgers and making plans to expand heaven’s territory or something!’

Mrs Cole laughed, but Arthur was wrong-footed by her joking about her husband’s death.

She turned to him and smiled again, ‘Don’t be mistaken, I do miss him, Father. It’s just, well…we were hardly ever together. He lived on a larger scale than me. He organised countries, I had trouble with my pantry.’

‘Of course,’ Arthur said. ‘I understand…and you must miss your daughter too?’ A patch of flamingos took flight from the shore. A flurry of water and wings. Arthur watched them, their pink legs held straight out behind them, their slow wing-flap.

‘Anne? Yes, I do, though I’ve not seen her for three years now.’

Her voice petered out, and for a moment just the sound of the flamingos filled the silence between them. Eventually she turned to face Arthur again, but her expression had changed. Her eyes were serious, grave.

‘She’s twenty-six now. Has a young man back in England, Jack. They’re engaged,’ she explained, ‘and would be married now, were it not for the war.’ She paused, took out another cigarette and lit it. Taking a deep breath she drew the smoke into her lungs and exhaled it with a sigh, as if she were breathing out more than just smoke.

‘Three months after war was announced he volunteered. And do you know who persuaded him to volunteer, Father?’ She looked back at Arthur and her eyes were hard, as if she were reproaching him. ‘A priest. The local church gave a recruitment sermon. All the boys went and listened. The vicar preached about a Christian war, about fighting the good fight. And they followed his words. Jack joined up with three of his friends after that sermon. Well, Anne had told me he’d always been keen on machines, good with his hands, and he was lucky, in a way: he joined the flying corps. His friends weren’t so lucky. They went to the line. I don’t know what’s happened to them. But Jack, well, he went to fly above those lines in his plane, spotting and recording. Three months ago he wrote to Anne and told her about a strange flight he’d had, an early patrol on a fine day, so he could fly high and still see clearly. There had been heavy fighting all week, he said. No-man’s-land looked as if it had been squashed under a giant’s foot. He was high enough to see both sides of the line, and as he said, they were only a few hundred feet apart anyway, when he noticed two identical formations on either side. A large group of men were fanned out around a point in the German communication trenches, and another group in the same formation were spread out opposite them on the British side. He flew lower to get a better look. First over the Germans, and then over the British. And then he realised. It was Sunday. The groups were communion services. They were praying, Father. He flew higher and looked down at them again, and there they were. Two church services worshipping the same God, spread out like a pair of butterfly wings either side of no-man’s-land.’

She held Arthur’s eye, then looked away, taking another draw on her cigarette.

Arthur was about to say something when she turned back and spoke again.

‘I was treating a young lad in Nairobi last month. He’d been badly wounded at Jessin. One morning as I was changing his dressing he took out two belts from under his bed and said to me, ‘Look at this, Sister, he’s got to be fibbing one lot of us, don’t you reckon?’ One belt was his. It had Dieu et man droit written on its buckle. The other was a German soldier’s. It also had a motto on its buckle: Gott Mit Uns ’.

This time she did not look away but kept her eyes on his. But they were not the same eyes. They had lost their hardness and they were no longer challenging, but questioning him, willing him for an answer.

She continued, speaking more softly, ‘The thing is, Father, I don’t see God anywhere in this war. With them or with us. And if he isn’t here, where I’d say we need him most, then I want to know where he is.’

Her face softened even more and Arthur saw she was holding back tears. He laid his hand on hers. He felt exhausted, drained by the attack and its aftermath.

‘I’m not sure I have the answers you’re looking for,’ he said. ‘I mean, I don’t know if I have them myself. But I understand your confusion, and you’re right, in a way. This isn’t God’s war, it’s man’s. But I do believe that God is here. If not in what happens, then maybe in what doesn’t. If that makes any sense. When a gun jams or misfires. When a bullet misses. I believe he is here then.’

Mrs Cole looked up into his face and he could see she wasn’t convinced. He looked out towards the flamingos, at their question mark necks lengthening to meet their reflections in the water.