Chris Cleave: Everyone Brave is Forgiven

“I see,” said Hamilton at last.

“I’m very sorry.”

“Do you know what my days consist of now? HQ gives me orders that are almost supernatural. This caloric requirement to be transcended, these mortal wounds to be healed, those laws of nature to be revoked. As if we weren’t soldiers but saints.”

“I remember when we were human beings.”

“Yes. Well, I don’t suppose you’d have let Heath take the swing on his own, back then.”

Simonson closed his eyes. A girlfriend had written the week before: Catherine, trusting he was having fun. He remembered her at Oxford. Her hair, smelling of strawberries. Their punt, adrift among the meadows of the Cherwell. His cheerful incompetence with the pole. The summer sun fixing the memory, immortalizing her laughter even as it pealed.

Outside, another raid was starting up. The courtyard emptied as everyone hurried to the guns.

Simonson stood. “I should go to my men—”

“Stay where you are. What good to them is a man like you?”

Simonson sat back down. The bombs came, shaking the earth, deepening his headache until he felt his skull must crack. Officers, bloody and disheveled, began to bring their reports — communications with HQ were cut; number nine gun was a total loss; Grandfield and Barlow were killed.

Hamilton sat behind his desk and took the reports one by one.

“Do you see it yet?” he said in a lull. “Do you see it from my point of view? Because I have all night, you know. We can do this as long as you like.”

More reports came.

“Oh, look,” said Hamilton, sliding a damage chit across the desk. “That aimer on Nine Gun — you know, the Geordie — he’s had the front of his foot blown off. Shall we give him an evacuation number, do you think, or should we pull some strings?”

Simonson held his aching head while bombs blew it apart.

“Interesting,” said Hamilton, replacing the handset of the field telephone. “There’s a second casualty from that hit on Nine Gun. He—”

“All right,” said Simonson, “you’ve made your point.”

The war would grind them down until all that remained was this bitter and sullen fury pounding in the center of his skull. The war would find the true hearts of them all as it found his own heart now: incensed, incandescent, unconsoled.

The raid died away, the guns fell silent. In the hiatus before the all-clear there was the stuttering sound of the damaged tail-enders fleeing.

“I hope you also see it from my point of view,” said Simonson. “For someone he cares about, a man must do what he can.”

“Regardless of the social order?”

“Regardless of the evacuation order.”

“I see. So, you cut a few corners for Heath. I won’t say it’s unnatural, only unbecoming. Of an officer, you understand.”

“I admit nothing,” said Simonson.

“Then we must do it by the book. One of you pulled strings, and if it wasn’t you then logically it must have been him. So I will wire the C/O at Gibraltar, and have him put that to Heath. And as you say, if Heath has an ounce of sense he will deny any knowledge and you’ll both be off the hook. I expect that’s what he’ll say, don’t you?”

Simonson turned his cap over and over.

Hamilton said, “It’s just that you would need to be certain — wouldn’t you? — that Heath shared your cynical disposition. Otherwise there’s no guarantee he won’t simply do the honorable thing and own up, and serve out the whole of his twelve-months in the loneliest jail in the Empire. Might not even survive it, in his condition.”

“Please. I do understand.”

“Then I shall give you till dawn to think it over. Let me have your answer then. Dismiss.”

Simonson turned in the doorway. “Sir, why must you do this?”

“I wouldn’t, if we had any bread. All I’ve left to give the men is fairness.”

—

Back in his room Simonson sat on his cot. A damaged moon was easing itself up from the sea, and he wished it wouldn’t. One would be released from all cares, at last, if the moon and sun didn’t always pop up like hospital visitors. He wished the Germans would make an effort and sink them both for good.

The orderly had brought a new stack of paperwork and squared it away on his desk. Alistair had gifted Simonson his jar of blackberry jam, and he laid it on the stack now as a paperweight. He rubbed the fatigue from his eyes and sat to write the next day’s manning order. Number One Gun would have a full crew, Number Two would be half manned, Number Three would be… oh, but it hardly mattered. The magazines were empty.

His eyes strayed to the jam, where the moonlight crept through the jar. The deep ruby color connected directly with his hunger. He could hardly force himself to stop looking. Saliva flooded his mouth. He spat, and lit another bitter cigarette.

If Alistair was too stupid to deny everything, then surely that was Alistair’s lookout. After the surprise and humiliation of his interview with Hamilton, Simonson shook. How could Alistair put him in this position? This was the disappointment with grammar school boys: they pounded on the door and then had no idea how to behave once admitted.

He found his eyes on the jar again. However irritating Alistair was, to eat the jam would be a betrayal — he was supposed to keep it, to share it with Alistair at war’s end. But it wouldn’t do any harm to take off the lid, surely, and smell it. It would not reduce by any fraction the quantity of jam that remained. And how many months had it been since he had smelled anything but smoke? Gun smoke, smoke of cigarettes and pipes, smoke from conflagrations terrestrial and naval, smokescreens laid down for cover. He was curious to know if he could still smell anything else. He unscrewed the jar and breathed in. He tried again. Nothing.

The two possibilities arising — that the jam was odorless, or that he had lost the facility for scents less brutal than smoke — seemed equally bleak. He replaced the lid and picked up his pen again, but he was too hungry for paperwork.

Perhaps Alistair would deny all knowledge, and they’d both be in the clear. Simonson considered it with a quick kick of hope, then came up short. Of course Alistair would do nothing of the sort.

He eyed the jam again. If he had lost his sense of smell, what else had he lost? It was known that battle stress numbed the senses one by one. What he feared most was that his will was gone. It was said that the self surrendered by small degrees before it finally collapsed. Panic tightened in his chest. What if he could not taste?

He unscrewed the lid again, scooped jam onto the blunt end of his pen, and tried it.

All over the desiccated island the bomb craters filled with rainwater. They overflowed, voiding their poison, until the water that pooled in them was sweet. Soon the first green algae began to bloom in their waters. Little creatures, outlandish and fitfully ambulant, multiplied on the bounty. Their tiny bodies quivered with unheard laughter. They lived and died and their resonant forms drifted down to the depths and as the sediment grew richer, plants took root in it, and reached up for the light, and were salves and banes and lilies. Their leaves unfurled and their stamens shook with laughter. Finches came and rested on the stems — the leaves trembled, the birds swayed like gymnasts, the laughter shook the air. More rains came, and seasons, and early evenings with light so delicate and shimmering that the laughter made ripples in the light itself, and turned the light to its own form, and the light made itself into the undulant bodies of lovers. Catherine looked up at him, laughter lining her eyes, while the river looped around meadows.

Simonson cradled his head. It was the most beautiful thing he had ever tasted. How tired he had been, how lost.