William Boyd - An Ice-Cream War

He turned over. It was only since he’d started spying on Liesl that the other dreams had left him. The dreams of Gleeson’s shattered face, of Bilderbeck’s shot, the steaming brain on his boot. Then the horrific race through the graveyard, the thumping feet of his pursuers. The writhing on the ground, the skewering, pronging jabs of the bayonets. He always woke up with the one that had glanced off his pelvis: when he felt the nail grating of the metal point juddering on the fresh bone, skidding off into his vitals.

He told Deppe about these dreams, how they came almost every night. Could that be why, he suggested, he was so weak and emaciated? Nonsense, Deppe replied confidently, dreams can’t have that effect.

Gabriel touched his throat, felt his bobbing, trembling Adam’s apple then trailed his fingers down his chest, touching a nipple, then through the damp chest hairs. He dragged a fingertip over the ridges of his ribcage, like rattling a stick on park railings. Then he flattened his palm over his belly, pressing down on the weals and distorted flesh of his two scars. Lower still he touched his penis, cupped and lifted his sweaty balls, feeling instantly more comfortable as he did so. It was curious, he thought, how the touch of your own hand on your genitals was so reassuring.

His mind began to wander. A soldier had been brought in with bayonet wounds the other day. Much worse than his, half his intestines on show. They had turned a peculiar carroty colour. He didn’t last long, even though Deppe was up all night operating, with Liesl and two of the other nurses. He’d worked hard that night too: they had been glad of his assistance. When the man died he brought everyone hot tea, got the cooks out of bed to make some food. Where had the dead man come from? someone had asked. From Morogoro, Deppe had said. The Central Railway. There’s heavy fighting there. We’re pulling back. It was surprising, Gabriel thought, how much you learnt from the war from casual conversation in a hospital. Injured men coming in from battlefields, cured ones going to new postings. Names were always being mentioned. He had quite a clear idea of the main troop dispositions, exactly as Major du Toit had said.

He sat up, shaking his head to wake himself. He suddenly saw what he had to do. Du Toit had been right all along. His position in the hospital was valuable. It was still valuable. He still had a job to do here. He would continue to gather information. He would conduct innocent conversations with the men in the wards, piece disconnected remarks together, build up a picture of the campaign. He felt suddenly elated by this. It was a kind of authorization of his continued presence. He would stay on in his present role for as long as he could: unassuming, ubiquitous, unsuspected. He would become an ‘intelligenter’, keep notes, plot positions on a map. And then? Then he would escape.

He lay back with a smile of satisfaction, and stretched his hands out to touch the sheet of butter muslin he used as a mosquito net. He wouldn’t think about escape just at the moment, though. He would stay on a few weeks and allow his store of information to accumulate. He felt his wound itching slightly, and he scratched at it through the bandages. Good, he thought, it’s beginning to fester again. He gritted his teeth and pressed his knuckles into the bandages, feeling the pain jolt along his leg. Deppe was coming tomorrow. It should look bad enough to get him back in the ward again.

Charis wrote to Gabriel every month. They were chatty, inconsequential letters about life at Stackpole and the family, but they now suddenly became almost unbearably hard to write. She had no idea if he ever received them because she never got a reply. All they knew was that he was wounded and a prisoner. She had asked Henry Hyams about letters and he had told her to send them care of Divisional Headquarters, Indian Expeditionary Force ‘B’, Nairobi. He said that supplies and provisions for the care of British POW’s were passed on to the Germans, which they were trusted to distribute, along with any personal letters. “That’s the general idea,” Henry Hyams had said. “Not that you can necessarily trust the huns to comply. But have a go, Charis my dear, have a go.”

So she wrote every month with an increasing sense of unreality, staring at Gabriel’s photograph, trying to summon up an image of him and their brief life together. It wasn’t very successful, and she had to keep stopping as, all too often, she ended up thinking of Felix.

But she hadn’t written for over six weeks now. For some reason she became suddenly convinced that all her letters had got through, that over the almost two years they had been separated they had come to represent — for Gabriel — his sole contact with the world he’d left in 1914. And as the days passed and the terrifying prospects of the future closed in, it was this personal failure that manifested itself as the most shameful sign of her guilt, the one thing that would ultimately condemn her and, even worse, lead Gabriel to guess that there was something terribly wrong.

But equally appalling in its way was the fact that there was nobody in the world to whom she could turn or confess. Not even Felix. He had written from Oxford saying that, as usual, he had booked them into the hotel in Aylesbury. She had invented a cousin in London and a visit there that would coincide neatly with the end of the summer term in Oxford. But everything had changed. She had written to Felix saying that she wasn’t well and wouldn’t be able to meet him. It was no lie.

But he wouldn’t leave her alone. Because she’d missed Aylesbury, he had started coming to the cottage in the middle of the night. And for the first time they had sex at Stackpole. This too had been enormously upsetting. She couldn’t use the bedroom — its associations with Gabriel were too intense — and so they made do with the sofa in the front room. But there was none of the conjugal intimacy of their hotel encounters. They couldn’t lie in each other’s arms and talk. When they finished they got dressed again, and Felix would sneak back to his room.

This improvisation — with its echoes of clandestine suburban adultery — proved doubly depressing. One night she’d broken down, crying into her hands. When Felix asked what was wrong she blamed it on the shabbiness of the way they were now forced to carry on. It was his total inability to console her, to say anything beyond a feeble. “Don’t worry,” or “It doesn’t matter,” that finally showed her Felix wouldn’t be — couldn’t be — any help. It wasn’t his fault. There was nothing he could do. It was simply the dreadful, final nature of her predicament.

Yet a solution did suggest itself with a kind of quiet, childlike logic one afternoon as she sat by the fishpond. She wasted no time. That evening she wrote to Gabriel. What she imagined would be the hardest letter of her life turned out to be simple and straight-forward. She told him everything, only leaving out the name and identity of her lover, and begged his under-standing and forgiveness.

She had sealed the letter and kept it in a drawer for several days, running through the futile options once more for form’s sake. Then the previous afternoon she had walked briskly into Stackpole village past the church where she’d been married, bought sufficient stamps at the post office and, without any pause, had placed it in the pillar box.

This done, a sort of cheerful calm had descended on her which was punctuated by brief moments of dreadful panic. These were quelled swiftly by an invocation to consider the future, which brought in its train such a sense of misery and guilt that the absolute rightness and inevitability of the course of action she planned to initiate established the comforting indifference again.