Strange Meeting Read online

  Strange Meeting

  Susan Hill

  Copyright © 2013, Susan Hill

  For John and Myfanwy Piper

  Contents

  Copyright

  Part One

  Part Two

  Part Three

  About the Author

  Part One

  He was afraid to go to sleep. For three weeks, he had been afraid of going to sleep.

  But then, because of some old, familiar sound or smell, suddenly recalled, in this room of his overlooking the rose garden, he recalled also the trick he had used as a child, to keep himself awake.

  He wanted to stay awake.

  In the hospital, it had been different. Because of the pain in his leg, and because he could not bear the noises of the ward at night, the sounds of hoarse breathing and death, and the crying of the Field-Gunner in the next bed, he had only wanted to sleep. He had asked them to give him something, had tried and failed to get whisky or rum. He had even tried to bribe Crawford.

  Crawford …

  He remembered Crawford’s eyes, and his soft jowls, folding inwards towards the small nose, and mouth and chin. Crawford, standing at the foot of his bed. It had not surprised him, their meeting there. Nothing like that was surprising now. Though, at first, Crawford had been busy with the Field-Gunner, had not come near Hilliard until the following day. Then, as always, in the past, their pointless, mutual dislike.

  ‘Hello, Hilliard. Got it through the calf, did you?’

  ‘Thigh.’

  ‘Left?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Bullet?’

  ‘No, shrapnel.’

  Crawford nodded. The flesh over his cheeks was carefully razored. But there were dark smears beneath his eyes, as though he, too, did not sleep.

  ‘Good for a month back home, then. You always were a clever devil, Hilliard.’

  When they were boys, they had both been sent to a dancing class, held on Saturdays at eleven, in the Methodist Hall.

  ‘If you are going to do a thing, do it properly,’ Constance Hilliard had said. ‘There is nothing to be ashamed of in learning dancing.’ He had not supposed that there was. His sister went, too. ‘Dancing will be a great asset to you later on, you will have me to thank for having taken you to proper lessons. I like a young man who knows how to dance.’ For she hoped that he would cut as good a figure as his father, would look so fine and be so accomplished, at the Waltz and the Lancers.

  Saturday mornings in the Methodist Hall, and the smell of dust between the grain of the floorboards, the squeak of chalk where the steps were marked out, and, over the echoing piano, the voice of Miss Marchment.

  ‘The Crawfords are taking their boy,’ his mother had said, though she scarcely knew the Crawfords. Hilliard was three years younger.

  He had not been embarrassed by the dancing class, only disliked it because he was no good, had no rhythm, could not convert her instructions into the right, patterned movements of his own feet.

  ‘You are to try, you are to stick to it. It will suddenly go “click” one morning, everything will fall into place, and then you will be like your father, you will be a beautiful dancer.’

  He knew that he would not, but he did not care, either, only went, each Saturday and was bored – and sat out, much of the time, because Miss Marchment became impatient.

  ‘You have no control, John Hilliard, no co-ordination.’

  Around the Methodist Hall, fat hot-water pipes ran like intestines, the lead-colour showing through in patches where the paint had worn away. He sat on the pipes and felt the secret movement of the water beneath him. They were warm pipes, though they did not give much of their warmth out to the hall. He sat, unworried, watching the others, watching Crawford. Crawford was good at dancing.

  They had scarcely spoken to one another, then or later, the edges of their lives scarcely overlapped. They went away to different Prep schools, a hundred miles apart. In the years that followed, they met sometimes, at other people’s parties. Once, they passed in different punts, on the Backs at Cambridge.

  But they had scarcely spoken to one another. There was only this dislike. Now, he saw that it had been because of something in Crawford’s expression, a smugness about the loose, soft cheeks, and the smallness of nose and mouth. But he was worried, this time, that someone he scarcely knew should have been, throughout his life, so consistently disliked. There ought to be no time, now, for that, no place for it. He was being petty.

  Since going to the front in April, he had found out so many things, came up against traits like this, which he could not accept. He had thought, before April, that he knew himself. He was wounded during the second week of the offensive, in July. Came home again. Was twenty-two, then. Knew everything. Nothing.

  And there had been Crawford, in a white coat, standing at the foot of his hospital bed. A familiar face. He had joined up straight from medical school, that first August.

  ‘Been out there long?’

  ‘April.’

  ‘And got yourself a blighty in July. I said you were a clever devil, Hilliard.’

  Why? What do you know about me? You know nothing. I dislike you, Crawford.

  But why that, either? Bloody silly. Childish. They were not children now. Crawford was Crawford. He had done nothing. Only that there was still the smugness of face, the fold of the jowls, the slight smile, as though he remembered that he had been good at dancing.

  Dancing …

  On the third night, he had tried to bribe him.

  ‘I’ll pretend I didn’t hear that, Hilliard.’

  ‘Look …’

  ‘Pack you off home on Wednesday. We need the beds, God knows. Nice casualty train, calm sea if you’re lucky. Month in Hawton. You’ll be all right.’

  ‘Crawford …’

  ‘How’s your sister?’

  ‘I can’t sleep.’

  No. Only see the pale, moving lights, hear the screens drawn, metal scissors dropped into enamel bowls, hear the Field-Gunner with the bandaged face, crying.

  ‘Think yourself lucky you got off a bit early. It’s no picnic now.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You’ve seen what’s coming in here, and there’ll be more. Something’s still boiling up. We hear things, you know.’

  But have you been there, Crawford, have you been?

  Well, does that matter? He has to be here, doesn’t he, somebody has to be here when they bring in the Field-Gunner, blinded.

  Non-Combatant Forces. Crawford.

  He wanted to sleep, shut out the noises. Why had it been so easy up there, to sleep on a firestep, on a table in a cellar, to fall asleep on horseback going up the road to Bapaume, to sleep through the noise of the guns? Not now.

  ‘I’ve got to sleep.’

  Crawford had gone away.

  Yet now, in the room above the rose-garden, he was trying the old trick of staying awake, keeping his head above the green-black water of nightmares. Outside, it was still, except, in the distance, the faint wash of the sea.

  The trick was, to order yourself to be dead asleep by the time you counted ten, or twenty. Then, you couldn’t do it, you stayed awake, for as long as you wanted. Ten. Fifteen. Twenty. ‘Go to sleep!’ Though perhaps, when he was a child, in this room, he had never, in fact, wanted it to be so very long, only wanted time enough to see the guests who were coming to dinner, or hear the owl begin to hoot in the trees at the bottom of the drive. Once, he stayed awake for the arrival of his mother’s cousin, who was a missionary in Africa (and who had been, after all, an ordinary woman in a dull green dress, who had been nothing, seen from two floors above through the stairwell, who bore no traces of Africa).

  Now, he wanted to stay awake. There was nothing to hear, for the owls had m
oved away some years ago, there were no visitors to see, he was no longer a child excluded from secrets. Now, there were no secrets. His leg was better, that would not keep him awake. It only ached slightly when he had been walking, or in the cold. But it was not cold, it was late August, it had been hot all the weeks at Hawton. Hot in France, too.

  He had been unhappy at home, where he could talk to no one, nobody knew, where they gave dinner parties and agreed about politics, where old men aired their military opinions and he could not join in, only sit there, staring at them, and then down his food, in disbelief. He had argued twice, bitterly, with his father. But after that, stayed silent. He had gone to London and wandered hopelessly about the streets, eaten in the club and listened to what they were saying there, too, had seen that life went on: flower-sellers sitting around Piccadilly, young women with parasols strolling in the sunshine through the Green Park, commissionaires in uniform, opening the doors of grand hotels. Uniform … He had felt a tightening in his head. Spoke to no one. Returned home. On the lawn under the cedar tree, his mother poured china tea for the ladies who came on Wednesdays to knit, grey and green socks and mittens and helmets, for the coming winter at the front. They turned their heads to watch him as he walked, limping slightly, up the gravelled path. The shadows were long and black, against the brightness of the sun. He had so hated being here.

  But there? Would he rather be there again? Or even where Crawford was, far behind the front line, standing at the foot of beds, hundreds of beds. For it had gone on, grown worse, throughout that summer. Crawford had known what they all knew. ‘We hear things.’

  Although, in England you could not tell exactly what was happening, only the official reports came through to the newspapers, telling nothing. He read them, read between the lines, read the Casualty Lists. Imagined. Knew.

  Knew that he had been wrong, unfair to Crawford, that there was no place for such petty feelings now. Could he have stood it himself, night after night in the military hospital, hearing the terrible noises? He should not continue to dislike Crawford.

  This was how it went on, he felt himself changing daily, felt himself to be old, twenty, thirty, fifty years older than when he had gone out in April. Hardened, too. He knew. Everything. There were no secrets. He scarcely recognized the person he had once been, the person his family seemed to remember.

  He did not want to go to sleep. He ordered himself not to, and so it would work, the old, childhood trick. He turned his head on the pillow, keeping his eyes open.

  It did not work, for he was conditioned, now, to obeying, not countermanding orders. Ten. Fifteen. Twenty. ‘Go to sleep!’ He slept.

  But at first, he dreamed only of horses, standing beside a hawthorn hedge in winter. The dark twigs were laced over with frost. There were four or five horses, and the breath came out of their nostrils and rose to hang and freeze, whitening on the air. He heard the soft thud of hoof on hard earth and the metal bits champing. Their muzzles were like the soft backs of moles.

  He half woke, turned over. Horses? The first time he had ridden a horse was out across the Wiltshire Downs from the Training Camp, early that year. He had written so, in a letter home.

  I’m settling down quite well here. We’re a mixed bunch but we get along. Some of it’s far pleasanter than I’d expected. For instance, I’m riding a horse for the first time in my life, and enjoying it greatly.

  His mother had written back at once.

  You are quite wrong about the riding, John. When you were four you rode a donkey on the sands at Eastbourne. Indeed, there is a photograph of you somewhere, sitting on a donkey and looking pleased. You were wearing a blue sun-hat. So you have certainly ridden before.

  He had thought of recounting it, as a funny story, to Mason-Godwin, who shared the hut with himself and Archer. But did not do so in the end, because it seemed disloyal, Mason-Godwin was not a friend. Was humourless. A neat man.

  That was the first time he had wished for Beth, for he could have begun to tell his sister the story and she would have at once supplied the ending, laughed with him, knowing their mother.

  He would like to see her. But he felt no nostalgia for Hawton, then or later, and had been ashamed of that at first. He was indifferent to home, to mother or father. He disliked neither of them, but did not particularly miss them. Nor had he any ties with friends or his own past. All around him, the men of B Company told stories, about mothers and wives and friendly neighbours, became sentimental towards evening, in the billets at Selcourt, sang. Hilliard read their letters for censoring and passed over the conventional phrases of love and longing with curious detachment. Though certainly he looked forward to getting the mail that came to him, as much as any of them did, looked forward to his mother’s parcels, and the letters full of moral encouragement, and local gossip. Anything that broke the monotony, or the fear.

  But he missed his sister. Beth’s letters were rather formal, disappointing. Communication between them had never been stated, they had relied upon thoughts and moments of humour, taken one another for granted. Were shocked by separation. The letters said nothing.

  For a while, half-sleeping again, he still heard the gentle tossing of the horses’ heads, saw their breath smoking, saw ice meshed with cracks across a puddle.

  Outside in the darkness, a hundred yards away, the soil became paler and drier, became sand, and the path led down to the beach.

  His leg cramped suddenly, jerking him awake, but then at once he fell heavily asleep again, a hand came over his face, thick, moist and cold as an ether mask, and forced him down into the nightmares.

  By day, walking about the garden or along the beaches in the hot sun, he had tried to remember the tiredness of the trenches, the lack of sleep that tipped him over into hysteria, to remember the longing for a mattress, sheets, a feather pillow. And there they were, on his own bed, in his own room. For three and a half weeks, he had been trying not to sleep.

  The nightmares rose up through him in waves, like bouts of nausea, and at their crest, burst open and spilled over one another on confusion. Tomorrow, he was travelling to rejoin the battalion.

  As he came awake the second time, he heard himself cry out. Had anyone else heard him? He sat up quickly, to shut out the sound of his own heart, thumping against the pillows, the rush of blood through his ears.

  The day they had taken the German trench, they found the bodies piled on top of one another in layers, like sandbags, making a wall.

  Jesus God, help me …

  It was very quiet in his room. He moved his arm over the mound of quilt and blanket, and the memory came back to him of the soft bodies. And then, the soft bolsters through which he had had to thrust a bayonet every morning that spring. Bayonet practice had been the only thing he could not take, at the Training Camp. He hated the look of the blade, and the click as you fixed it home, the idea that it was somehow an extension of his own arm. Rifle shooting had been different, a skill to master and almost a matter of pride, to aim through the pale, clear light of March, across the open field to a neat target. He found that he was rather good at shooting. But not the bayonet.

  The sweat was cooling on his back. The worst thing in his nightmares was always the smell, the sweet, rotten trench smell, of soil and chlorine and blood, and the mustard gas like garlic. His bedroom window was open and the room was full of the scent of roses, coming up from the warm garden. A sweet smell, and curiously like some cream or powder in a jar on his mother’s dressing table. A sweet smell.

  He pushed the bedclothes away, retching, leaned over the washbasin and felt the walls of his stomach clench uselessly. Only a little water came up into his mouth, tasting bitter. He ran the tap and rinsed his mouth out, splashed his face. Shivered. Yet he had never been sick in France, not even felt sick, and only once had he had to turn his face away at the sight of a wound. He did not retch at the real things, only the memory of them, here in his old room above the rose garden.

  Tomorrow, he was going back, and h
e would rather that than go back now to his bed. He had to get out of this room. He could still smell the roses.

  It was somehow reassuring just to be putting on his clothes, to feel cotton and Shetland wool against his skin. He went out, walking on the grass in case the crunch of his feet on the drive woke them, and his mother should call out or come down, urging him back to bed, to sleep.

  He went between the fruit trees into the copse, and took the path leading down to the beach. It was very warm, the sky clear and pricked all over with stars. First he heard the soft hiss and suck of the sea, and then saw it, thin and silvered as a snail’s trail where the moon lay along its edge.

  The tide was right out, so that he had to wade through mounds of loose sand before it became damp, firm and satisfying under the soles of his feet. It was a wide bay, curved between two wooded tongues of land, and the coast continued like this, open and gentle, for more than twenty miles, before the cliffs grew steeper and more rocky, the currents dangerous. He lit a cigarette and the striking of the match, on open ground at night, made him panic, turn and look behind him, before he remembered where he was. He threw the match into a pool between two ribs of sand. Then, he began to walk slowly along the water line, no longer afraid, but poised between a sense of reassurance, at the sound of the night sea, and despair, because he had been at home and unhappy for three and a half weeks, he cared nothing for any of them, could explain nothing. He was simply waiting. For?

  His mind filled up suddenly with ordinary details, about his journey back tomorrow, about what he should not forget to take with him, things he had promised people – a bottle of old brandy, chocolate, a good torch, a pair of wire cutters that would actually cut wire, Gilbert and Sullivan music for Reevely, who sang so badly and had such ambitions: he wondered where he would find his battalion, where they would be going to next, who was left. He thought – I want to go back. For there was nothing for him here.

  ‘You must go across to The White Lodge,’ Constance Hilliard had said, during the first week of his leave. ‘The Major is so anxious for you to go and have a talk to him, he feels so out of things. He doesn’t see so well nowadays. You must be very patient with him. I have told him that you will be coming.’