My Dear I Wanted to Tell You

Purefoy scurried on, away from the captain’s look. I really don’t know my place, do I? But – Oh, yes, I was going to improve myself, wasn’t I? The thought burnt up like all the others, in the grimy, unpleasant duties of the day.

*

Captain Locke was a pure man, with pure and pleasurable tastes. As a boy he had liked to follow the gardener around the old greenhouses at Locke Hill, to smell the earth and help pick the grapes. Latin verse had amused him. When he played cricket he had reminded his cousin Rose of an actual cricket, with his terribly long legs and his cheerful disposition. Even playing his cello, plaintively and not very well, he had looked like a soulful insect, all elbows and knees.

He had noticed a surviving patch of gooseberry bushes on the parados, remnant of some long-gone Frenchman’s garden, and one evening crawled under them, froglike, on his back, to prune them. The new leaves were a golden, melting, greenish colour, and the sun shining through them put him in mind of a chandelier he had come to know during his honeymoon: burnt-sugar Murano glass, eighteenth century. He had seen it often, lying on his back in the big white bed at the Cipriani, while his beautiful soft creamy-rosy-marble wife Julia lay in his arms, or crawled across him, wrapped around him, delighting and enchanting him, as they came to realise that there was really nobody there – no parents, no schoolmasters, no vicars – to tell them they couldn’t or shouldn’t just take off all their clothes in that paid-for foreign room and do anything they wanted. And they did. Things neither of them had ever thought of; things that made them blush. Her beautiful, beautiful flesh, and her sweetness, her kindness to him, and the lovely way she always seemed to be on his side, even when he was being a bit of a twerp, not knowing things about what a woman wants . . . Well, how could he? Sisterless, a schoolboy, a university man . . . Apart from Rose, he hardly knew any woman at all. Rose had a phrase about English public schoolboys: physically over-developed, intellectually semi-developed, emotionally not developed at all. Good old Rose . . .

He and Julia had begun, in their Venetian privacy, to develop that emotional side. When his father had died so suddenly, Julia had been everything a man could wish for. When he was obliged to take over Locke Hill, she had glided into her role as chatelaine with the grace of a woman twice her age. She knew how to talk to servants. She took care. On their return to Locke Hill, after Mother had moved out – said she’d much rather be in the little flat in Chester Square – Julia had made Locke Hill, with its warm red bricks and polished wood and slanting sunshine, into a kind of heaven. She knew how to choose the colours to paint things; she needlepointed charming cushions, her lovely mouth instructed Millie how to plump and place them just so, and called Max the red setter in from the frosty lawn. He quite fell in love again with the crook of her fragrant elbow holding the trug, as she took the lavender from the stone-flagged terrace to the piles of smooth-ironed sheets in the big linen press. Every night he had raced home from Locke and Locke (he’d been promoted – a married man now) to try to get her pregnant.

He hadn’t, during the honeymoon, paid much attention to the chandelier, but the colour, the melting light, had stayed in his mind. Now it was a brutal little shaft of memory, pricking and stalling him, and when thus stalled and sabotaged he had to stop a moment to put the memory away.

‘Gooseberries, lovely gooseberries,’ he said, out loud, but softly. ‘Someone might be grateful, in a few months, if they survive. Not much chance of a mackerel to go with it, I suppose, but a gooseberry is always a lovely thing.’

Purefoy was touched by Locke’s apparent belief that some kind of future, the time it took for a gooseberry to ripen, was a possibility. He found Locke a decent bloke.

*

The new trench had been in French hands before, and quite a hotspot. Rebuilding the communication lines after a hit, the Paddingtons found corpses in the walls, scraps of uniform, the smell, a hand. When a shell hit, thundering your head and splitting your eyes, it was not only fresh limbs and organs that showered you. There was a French lad under the floor of the trench too: he appeared between the duckboards. They had been walking on him. They dug him up and buried him again, and Purefoy got sick: puking and crapping like a dog, too weak to walk. Burgess dragged him along to the MO’s dugout, which was in itself unusual, for Burgess never did anything helpful.

He murmured to Purefoy as they went, confidentially, under the arm slung over his shoulder for support: ‘We could do each other a favour, you know, Riley . . .’

Purefoy heaved, his stomach wrenching.

‘Make it worth your while,’ Burgess was saying. ‘It’d be no trouble to you . . .’ He eyed Purefoy sideways. Honest Riley. Worth a punt,forold times’ sake. Too good an opportunity, really. ‘Give us some of your puke, Riley, and I’ll make us both rich. There’s knackered men round here who’d pay good money for a couple of days in hospital.’

Purefoy turned his hanging head to look at him, and Burgess gave a little I-didn’t-invent-the-system shrug, and a straight look back. ‘You can’t say they don’t deserve a rest,’ he said meekly.

Purefoy’s stomach heaved; he puked on Burgess. Burgess laughed, his dimples pitting his cheeks. ‘Thanks, old pal,’ he said.

The MO sent Purefoy to a field hospital towards Amiens for two days’ rest and anti-laxatives. Over the next few days seven men from the Paddingtons turned up with the same condition. But, then, it was the kind of bug that got around, and most of them had been digging alongside Purefoy and the dead French boy.

*

When Purefoy returned, Captain Locke called him in. Purefoy thought Locke didn’t look that well either.

‘Purefoy,’ Locke said, shuffling papers. ‘Er. Yes. You’re to be promoted.’

What?

‘Experience, courage, attitude on the field and in the trenches – hasn’t gone unnoticed. Some concern that you aren’t quite a gentleman, but – well – beggars and choosers, rather, no reflection on you. You’re a fine soldier. The men respect you.’

Purefoy, who had seen braver men and better attitudes, Ainsworth for example, said so, in the accent his mother disliked, which he couldn’t help using in the company of the class he’d learnt it from, the accent that had made it possible for him to be promoted from the ranks. ‘And I can’t afford it,’ he said.

‘You won’t have to keep a horse,’ Locke said. ‘And the regiment’s had some donations. One from – someone who knows you.’

A silence.

Another silence, of a slightly different quality.

‘Sir Alfred,’ Purefoy said. He glanced at the floor. ‘I shall be sorry to have to disappoint him.’

‘Your name was on the list before Sir Alfred made his donation. It’s coincidence, Purefoy.’

It’s bribery.

‘Well, then, Fate is conspiring to benefit me, sir,’ said Purefoy, ‘but I can’t possibly accept it. I cannot have the regiment . . . um . . . for my advancement.’

‘The regiment requires your obedience, Purefoy. The regiment is promoting you, the financial circumstances allow. You have no choice.’

Was it bribery? He didn’t think Locke was lying about the coincidence.

‘Is that an order, sir?’

‘It can be. I’d rather it didn’t have to be. Listen – perhaps your benefactor thought you wouldn’t accept if he offered to support you directly. But the idea of this promotion came from the regiment, as it should, and it impugns the regiment’s honour to suggest otherwise. Do you want to impugn the regiment’s honour, Purefoy?’

Purefoy did not want to impugn the regiment’s honour.

‘No, I didn’t think so. So stop making me do a moral dance for you, Purefoy. Accept your good fortune, and don’t be so surprised,’ said Locke. ‘Seems to me the men like someone leading them who has an idea what they’ve been through. If the top brass have finally noticed that, then good.’

‘Isn’t that a bit, ah, Communist, sir?’ asked Purefoy, and Locke said, ‘Watch it. You’re still a private for now.’

‘I just don’t see why me, sir,’ said Purefoy.

‘Don’t be disingenuous, Purefoy,’ said Locke, and Purefoy raised an eyebrow. ‘Exactly. How many of the men know what disingenuous means? The army needs your type.’

I’ve heard of Chopin, I’ve got a vocabulary, therefore I’m fit to lead, he thought. Oh, God, you want me to lead them.

Locke drummed his long fingers on the tea chest and gave Purefoy a frank look. ‘Purefoy, old man,’ he said, ‘I would much rather have you than a nineteen-year-old direct from the school OTC.’

And Purefoy thought, Well, you’ll have to promote me now – you can’t say incendiary things like that to a man in the ranks.

*

‘Where you off to, then?’ said Burgess, darning his socks on a tree stump, not looking up, as Purefoy rattled past with his kitbag.

‘I’m going to Amiens,’ said Purefoy. ‘To be trained in natural superiority and talking posh. And not taking care of my own kit, eating well and sending other men to their deaths. Do you want to come?’

Burgess looked up then. ‘Oh, are you,’ he said. ‘Are you. Well, good luck, Private Purefoy. Don’t forget us. We won’t forget you.’

‘It’s all the same when a shell lands on you,’ said Purefoy.

‘Ah, but a shell doesn’t land you, does it?’ said Burgess. ‘Because you’re in a nice little dugout, listening to opera. Aren’t you?’

Purefoy paused a moment. ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘You’re right. No officer has ever been killed in this or any other war.’ Captain Harper’s shining body flew again across his mind.

Burgess waggled his fingers. ‘Bye-bye!’ he said, in a singsong voice.

‘Piss off, Johnno,’ said Purefoy, as he shouldered his bag, and went.