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“You loathed Cuthbert-Smith,” said Ellwood. “Yes. Well. I shall miss loathing him.”
Gaunt took a swig of whisky. He didn’t much like the taste, but it made him feel light, as if people weren’t looking at him. Or, perhaps, it made him feel as if he shouldn’t mind it if they did.
“You’re not afraid of dying, Henry. You’re just opposed to killing. That isn’t cowardice.”
Gaunt did not hesitate before he signed, although he felt as if his name was being ripped from him. He was simmering with a restlessness like that he felt in the boxing ring; a determination to hurt and be hurt, an impulse towards disaster and destruction, and nothing else would have satisfied him. He would not be a pansy German pacifist. He could not help that he was German, and he could not seem to help whatever he felt when Ellwood pressed himself close. But he could jolly well kill people.
Of course Ellwood was proud of Gaunt. He recognised that bravery could only exist where there was fear, and so of all of them, only Gaunt was truly capable of heroism.
He wasn’t surprised. Gaunt always fled when their friendship threatened to tilt into something more complicated. It was an uncomfortable, unspoken thing between them. Ellwood was in love with Gaunt. Gaunt was thoroughly decent and conventional.
It was amazing how much less affectionate “With affection” sounded than “Affectionately.”
“Sometimes I think you’ve read more than I have, Gaunt.” “Of course I have. I’m just less pretentious.”
“You should have seen what a state I was in, the first time I heard one of them laugh. It’s hard to want to kill someone once you’ve heard that.” Maitland paused. “I still hear him laugh, sometimes. That first man.”
What I meant to say is this: You’ll write more poems. They are not lost. You are the poetry.
Dear Sandys, I don’t make friends easily. I should say I have only three: Gideon Devi, who I knew in childhood. Ellwood. You. Whenever I’m out of the line, I check The Times for your name and for Gideon’s. I began this letter planning to tell you I could not imagine your grief; but that isn’t true. I do imagine it, over and over. If you were killed, I doubt I should receive a telegram—our friendship has always been too tenuous for others to be aware of it. Still, in my imagination, I receive a telegram. I see your name and think, There goes the man I might have spoken to, had I only been able
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“What’s the matter with you, you coward?” I asked him sternly, because my men were watching. And then the man pulled away from me, and I saw his eyes. They were bulging hideously out of his head, and he was taking great, gasping breaths. “Gas,” muttered someone. “Don’t be ridiculous. It was outlawed at the Hague Convention,” I said. I actually said that. I actually believed that the principles of our civilisation, our civilisation that has developed further than any other in the history of the world, giving us telephones and trains and flying, for God’s sake, we can fly, I thought, surely such
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The Hague Convention sought to make war more humane. We had reached a point in history where we believed it was possible to make war humane.
Unrequited love was a difficult thing to live with, but Ellwood managed because Gaunt needed him. He had never really known how much. This letter was not the way he would have chosen to discover the depths to which he was embedded in Gaunt’s soul.
“Well, I’m wired,” said Huxton, comfortably. He pulled a pack of playing cards out of his rucksack. “What do you say to a game of cards, Gaunt?” Gaunt stared at the cards as if he had seen a ghost, and then, to Ellwood’s abject horror, he burst into tears. The three men watched him in utter silence as Gaunt howled, an insane, animal sound, his eyes wide open as the tears streamed out of them. “I missed and shot Harkins in the head,” he had written in his letter to Ellwood. “He’d signed up in 1914 and never been injured. No one would play him at cards, because he always won.” “Henry—” said
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“Have you seen him cry like that before?” Hayes shifted on his feet. “I—I don’t like to say.” “Christ.” “He’ll be all right,” said Hayes. “He just needs a rest, that’s all. He’s tired. We’re all tired.” Tired. A new word ought to be invented, if this was tired.
Gaunt couldn’t look at him the next day. It was as if he had gorged himself on the sight of Ellwood, when his pupils had swallowed up his eyes and he had begged for more. Ellwood tried not to think about it. “I have seen them gentle, tame, and meek, / That now are wild and do not remember….”
“Impossible to get any sleep in this house with all that racket, Gaunt,” said Huxton. “As always, Huxton, you are the true victim of the War,” said Gaunt.
“Haven’t you had the poetry scoured out of you yet?” asked Gaunt. Ellwood frowned. “I need it now more than ever. “Behold, we know not anything; I can but trust that good shall fall At last—far off—at last, to all, And every winter change to spring.”
Gaunt was woven into everything he read, saw, wrote, did, dreamt. Every poem had been written about him, every song composed for him, and Ellwood could not scrape his mind clean of him no matter how he tried.
In the hypermasculine atmosphere of war, they were not overly concerned with manliness.
He looked even more like a painting than usual. He radiated peace and prosperity. He was 1912; a world where savagery had been purged from the human spirit, for ever and ever.
Gaunt turned over to face Ellwood and caught his eye. Ellwood smiled, and a sudden, dry bleakness spread over Gaunt’s heart as he thought of Hercules, and Hector, and all the heroes in myth who found happiness briefly, only for it not to be the end of the story.
The only thing that prevented Divisional Rest with Ellwood from being the happiest time in Gaunt’s life was the certainty that it would end, and the knowledge that what would follow would shatter him. Even if they should both, by some miracle, survive the War unharmed, Gaunt didn’t know how he would stand by Ellwood’s side at the altar and watch him marry Maud after these hazy, sunny weeks of kisses and poetry and sex.
“He’s a revolting little snake. He’s probably never seen a dead body.” An agonising laugh broke out of Gaunt. “Oh, God, Elly, is that how we judge men now?” Ellwood didn’t answer.
“Need some help with loading your rifle, Captain? You’re about as good with a gun as you are with the girls,” he said, one afternoon. Ellwood, who had been rubbing at the gunmetal with an old rag, lifted the barrel ever so slightly, training it at Lansing’s chest. “Your mother’s never had any complaints,” he said. Lansing roared with laughter.
It wasn’t fighting that killed Lansing, in the end. He was fumbling in his pocket for a box of matches, and his fingers caught on the ring of a grenade, blowing himself up, along with two others.
“I want to be a politician,” said Maud. “You don’t want a politician for a wife.” Ellwood laughed. “You can’t even vote.” Maud did not answer.
Ellwood sat down behind the headstone and ran his fingers through the blades of grass. He did not see colours the way he used to. He knew that the grass must be a vibrant, aching green, but it did not seem so to him. More vivid were his memories of Gaunt’s strangely feminine hands, which Ellwood had always thought better suited to piano playing than to boxing. It was as if Ellwood hovered in some unreal place where the living faded and the dead took form, and all the world was vague.
The birds chattered merrily on the wet brown branches. Daffodils sunned out among the headstones. How alive it all seemed, and how gracious—to die in an era when your death bought you a brief moment at the centre of something. To be important, rather than one of millions.
“My Peter was killed at Loos,” said the farmer when he brought the milk. “Were you at Loos?” Ellwood was forced to admit he had been. “What was it like?” He did not know how to answer. It was the Hell you’d feared in childhood, come to devour the children. It was treading over the corpses of your friends so that you might be killed yourself. It was the congealed evil of a century. So he had simply stared at the farmer, speechless, until his mother took his arm and led him away, as if he was a drunken old fool. “He’s very tired,” she’d apologised to the farmer. Yes. He was very tired.
“I found something of Henry’s that I think you should see,” said Hayes. Ellwood’s hand shook slightly as he took the stationery pad that Hayes held out to him. He lifted the cover and looked at the first sheet of paper, instantly recognising Gaunt’s neat blue handwriting: My dearest, darling Sidney,
Ellwood mouthed the words. “My,” just the word “my” would have been enough to live on, if Gaunt had ever called him that to his face. “He never called me Sidney. Not once, in five years.” He looked up at Hayes. “What does it mean?” “I don’t know,” said Hayes. He sat stiff and upright on the bed. “Why didn’t he finish it?” “I don’t know,” said Hayes. “He knew he was going to die.” “He thought you both would.” “But he never called me Sidney.” He never called him any of it. My, dearest, darling. Sidney. Ellwood leant back against the window, his throat stretching long as he looked up. “If Gaunt
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His brief joy was transfigured into the horror of discovering something new about Gaunt, and knowing there was a limit to how many more discoveries could be made. Perhaps this was his last one.
Gaunt had marched into gunfire, but he was too much of a coward to keep his head in a tunnel. The thought occurred, flickering and insubstantial, that he might have preferred being killed at Ypres to discovering such a weakness in himself.
He had not realised that the cracks would spread so far, nor so deeply.
“To faint in the light of the sun she loves, / To faint in his light, and to die,” he thought. He felt no pain at all.
He seemed incapable of understanding the extent of his worth. I hoped adulthood would teach him how much we loved him.
Ellwood had been awarded a Military Cross. The ribbon was sewn onto his pyjamas. It seemed ironic that the part of him that would once have been overjoyed at the sight of the medal was precisely what had been blighted in obtaining it.
His poems were published in newspapers. People gobbled them up, glutting themselves with horror. They wrote glowing reviews, as if the War were a deliciously grim new play on the West End. Ellwood wondered who the reviewers were: Men too old to enlist? Women? Men whose journalistic pursuits had been deemed integral to the war effort? How could they live with themselves? He didn’t care about the poems, one way or another. He merely cut away the blackened, gangrenous bits of his soul and sold them.
Gaunt turned to him with an expression that seemed to hold a thousand things at once. “Hullo, Elly,” he said. “How’ve you been?”
It was that bitterness, more than anything else, that convinced Ellwood it was true, that Gaunt was really there. Ellwood wanted to love him, but his heart seemed to be made up of edges; and instead of affection, a choking anger built beneath his ribs.
“Are you a hero, Elly?” asked Gaunt, softly. “They’re giving these out to anyone who sneezes at the Germans now,” said Ellwood. “Doesn’t mean a thing.” “You were mentioned in dispatches, I heard. Saved six people’s lives.” Ellwood gave an exasperated sigh. “Half of them died at the clearing station.” “Caught a bullet for your trouble, I gather?” “Bit of shrapnel,” said Ellwood. “I was never too keen on the left side of your face, anyway.” “I’ve lost an eye,” said Ellwood, sticking out his chin. Gaunt did not answer, taking a long drag of his cigarette. People had different ways of masking
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“I was sorry to hear about Bertie,” said Gaunt, which was a selfish thing to say, Ellwood thought. I’m sorry, people said, and then they had cleared their conscience, and Ellwood was left with the memories.
“I feel such a bounder, lying up in luxury like this,” he said. He wished Gaunt would speak, or go, or promise never to leave. “But at the same time, I’m unspeakably glad to be away from it all. I’m disgusted with myself, but it’s true. Have you ever heard of anything so cowardly?”
“Don’t go.” “I won’t,” said Gaunt. “I’m not going anywhere.”
He hadn’t let himself imagine his reunion with Ellwood, because he had been so convinced that it would never happen. It hadn’t once occurred to him that Ellwood wouldn’t be pleased to see him, if it did. He did not fool himself into believing Ellwood’s wound was the extent of the damage. More frightening than the bandages was the blankness in his remaining eye. The sense that Gaunt was looking at a stranger, one who did not love him and never would.
The library at Thornycroft was well stocked with novels and poetry, but it was Classics Gaunt wanted: Plutarch and Xenophon and Thucydides, men who proved that Gaunt’s own troubles were ancient and survivable.
“Μεγαλοψυχίη το φέρειν πραέως πλημμέλειαν,” he said. It is magnanimous to bear offence calmly. “Συγγνώμη τιμωρίας κρείσσων,” said Maud. Forgiveness is better than revenge.
“I’ve decided it doesn’t matter whether you love me back,” said Gaunt. Some long-dead poet must have written the lines with which to answer, but Ellwood no longer knew them.
