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7 a.m.
July 1st 1916
The Somme valley, France
You notice the noise most when it stops. When the silence comes rushing in with a force that takes your breath from you.
And then the birdsong.
Above, the sky is pale blue, endless. It’s been raining for weeks, but yesterday the clouds rolled back, and they made their stumbling progress towards the front line through a dawn of limpid summer loveliness. Now, tipping his head back, it seems like he can see all the way to heaven. Like he could touch it.
High up, a plane hangs in the blue, the sun catching its wings. Like a dragonfly.
For a moment, standing on the mud-gummed duckboards of the communication trench with his face turned up to the early sun, he catches a whisper of summer—green earth and good grass—above the pervasive reek of latrines, rotting sandbags, and damp khaki (and the faint trace of vomit on Robinson’s breath, behind him). His mind returns to the morning he arrived at Coldwell, walking across the park from the road, seeing the house for the first time.
In that instant, the image is more vivid than the slimed sandbag walls bracketing him, the mud-crusted pack on Joseph’s back a few inches ahead. He closes his eyes, wanting to hold on to it, willing himself back across the miles, across the years; and his hand goes to the chest of his tunic where the letters in his pocket are pressed against his body by a bandolier of ammunition and seventy pounds of equipment.
He started writing a week ago. On their last day behind the lines, when the British bombardment had just begun, supposedly smashing the enemy into submission but rattling the nerves, battering the eardrums, and shattering the sleep of their own troops in the process.
The letter has been a distraction. Writing it has filled the endless hours as they moved out of their billets and joined the river of khaki flowing into the reserve lines. It has given him something to think about amidst the noise and boredom and mounting tension, and diverted his thoughts during night fatigues carrying heavy tins of explosive through the labyrinth of mud-filled trenches to where tunnellers waited to pack it into the mine, ready to blow the enemy lines sky-high at the start of whatever is coming.
Once he started writing, he found he couldn’t stop. It was like talking to her; the conversations they had never had the chance to have, the explanation he had never had the chance to give.
The forgiveness he had never had the chance to beg.
The ink was scarcely dry when he shoved the letter into an envelope an hour ago. He has no address for her, so he will put it with the other letter he has written, in the envelope marked To be sent in the event of my death.
In front of him the line of men begins to move again, inching forward. The Sherwood Foresters will be in the third wave to go over the top, they were told over the rum ration this morning; behind the 1st Londoners and the North Staffordshires. It’ll be an easy stroll, the brass hats say.
He has written the letter for himself, really, to ease his own troubled mind. He doesn’t have any hope that it will find her, because in almost five years of looking, he never has. And if, by some miracle, it does…
Well, it will be too late.
7.20 a.m.
July 1st 1916
Brighton, England
She opens the door at the bottom of the area steps and stands in a slant of pale sunlight, eyes half-closed. The air is as cool and fresh as a glass of milk.
The damp gloom of the passage chills her back, so she emerges further, savouring the sun after a week of rain, and breathing in the scent of the yellow roses that climb up the basement wall. Far above the rooftops of Belgrave Place the gulls reel and glide, and today their cries sound jubilant rather than mournful. Listening, she notices the quiet that shimmers beyond the sounds of an everyday morning—the distant clang of milk churns, the spluttering throb of a motor—and she realises that the rumble of the guns has stopped.
She wonders what it means. If it is a good sign or a bad one.
She had heard them that morning, more distinctly than ever. The sound is like thunder rumbling in the distance, never getting closer. The noise is carried across all those empty miles of ocean and she can’t imagine what it must be like close at hand. How anyone can endure it without going mad.
Of course, they don’t. Not all of them. The hospital has had a number of men suffering the effects of the guns, not on their bodies but their minds. Soldier’s heart, the nurses call it.
The thought of the hospital casts a cloud over the brightness of the morning. It is Saturday, which means she will spend the afternoon there, ‘making herself useful,’ as Mrs Van de Berg puts it: helping the men to write letters and reading out bits from the newspaper to keep them entertained. (‘We must all do our bit for our dear boys, Simmons,’ Mrs Van de Berg says, and has decided that her bit is sending treats to the officers’ convalescent home and donating her housekeeper for two afternoons a week to the Auxiliary Hospital on Lewes Crescent.)
A cat pads languidly along the railings on the street above and settles on the top step, curling its tail neatly around its body. Two floors up, a cacophony of hysterical barking erupts, ignored by the cat, who, with a nonchalance that borders on insolence, applies itself to washing a paw. She sighs. If Mrs Van de Berg’s querulous Pekingese is awake, that means Mrs Van de Berg will be too, waiting for her morning tea.
Reluctantly, she pushes away from the sun-warmed wall. As she turns to go inside, she notices that one of the rose stems is broken. She snaps off the heavy bloom, not for Mrs Van de Berg’s drawing room but for the kitchen, to put in the Chinese vase that she bought on foolish impulse in Hanningtons department store last year, while shopping for towels for the upstairs guest bathroom. She is just stepping back into the cabbage-and-carbolic-scented basement when a noise stops her in her tracks.
A muffled boom. A distant baritone blast that rattles the china on the dresser and makes her heart lurch in her chest.
The cat stops washing, paw held aloft.