"Then be strong for my sake," she said. "I am not indifferent to what happens to you or to any of your friends. I am not impatient. I will wait for you." He was encouraged by her. He told her what he had felt when he was on leave in England, when he had stood by the field.

Jeanne said, "You see! There is a God, there is a purpose to it all. But you must be strong."

She took his hand and held it tightly. He looked at her pale, imploring face.

"Do it for my sake," she said. "Go back, go where they ask you. You are lucky. You will survive."

"I feel guilty that I have survived when all the others are gone." He returned to brigade headquarters. He did not want to be on the staff. He wanted to be back with the men in the trenches.

He managed only to exist.

His life became grey and thin, like a light that might at any moment be extinguished; it was filled with quietness.

ENGLAND 1978-79--PART FIVE

"Any progress?" said Elizabeth to Irene during her weekly visit.

"Not really," said Irene. "He says it's proving more difficult than he thought. He's still working at it, but your grandad seems to have covered his tracks pretty well."

Two months had passed since Elizabeth had given Bob the diary and she decided she would have to find other ways of making contact with the past. From his officer's handbook she discovered which regiment her grandfather had been in, and attempted to trace its headquarters.

After a series of telephone calls and unreturned messages she found that the regiment had ceased to exist ten years earlier, when it had been amalgamated with another. The headquarters was in Buckinghamshire, where Elizabeth drove one Saturday afternoon.

She was met with suspicion. Her car was searched thoroughly for bombs and she was made to wait for an hour before a young man eventually came to see her. He was the first soldier Elizabeth had ever met. She was surprised by how unmilitary he seemed. He had the attitude of most clerks and small officials: regimental documents were held somewhere, hard to reach, confidential; there was not much chance.

"The thing is, you see," said Elizabeth, "that my grandfather fought in this war and I would like to find out more about it. People don't always appreciate what sacrifices were made for them--still are made for them--by the armed forces. All I would need is a list of names of people in his... battalion, company, whatever it was. I'm sure an organization as efficient as the army must keep good records, mustn't it?"

"I'm sure everything's in order. It's a question of access. And confidentiality, as I've explained."

They were sitting in a little wooden guardhouse near the main gate. The corporal folded his arms. He had a pale, unhealthy-looking complexion and short brown hair.

Elizabeth smiled again. "Do you smoke?" She held the packet across the table.

"I'll tell you what I'll do," he said, leaning across to accept a light. "I can let you have a look at the regimental history. That should give you some names at least. Then you can follow it up from there. Of course, I don't suppose there's many of them still alive."

"We must waste no time then," said Elizabeth.

"You wait here. I'll have to go and get you a pass."

He left the room and a very young man with a rifle came to stand guard, in case, it seemed to Elizabeth, she should attack.

The corporal gave her a piece of card with a safety pin, which she attached to her chest, and took her inside a large brick building. He let her into a room with a plain deal table and two hard chairs. It looked to Elizabeth like the kind of place in which interrogations took place. He handed her a heavy volume bound in red cloth and stood in the corner watching her as she leafed through it.

Prominent among the names revealed by the regimental history was that of a Captain, later Colonel, Gray. Elizabeth wrote down various other names on an envelope that was in her bag. There was apparently no chance of the corporal's finding, let alone revealing, any addresses. She thanked him effusively and drove back to London.

That evening she rang Bob to see if he had made any progress with the notebook. She said, "I've got a few names of people I think must have been in it with him, but I've no idea how to get in touch with them. There's someone called Gray, who seems to have been important, but he must be incredibly old if he's still alive."

She heard Bob whistling pensively at the other end. "Have you thought of _Who's Who?' _he said. "If this Gray got some sort of medal or went on to do something in civilian life he might be in there."

Elizabeth found a three-year-old copy of _Who's Who _in the public library in Porchester Road and worked her way through the details of the fifty-two Grays included. They had distinguished themselves in a range of business activities and public service but few of them had even been born before 1918. Over the page was one last Gray.

"GRAY, William Allan McKenzie," she read. "Senior consultant Queen Alexandra's Hospital, Edinburgh, 1932-48. fo Calcutta 18 Sept 1887, s of Thomas McKenzie Gray and Maisie Maclennan; _m _1920 Joyce Amelia Williams _d _of Dr A R Williams; one s one _d. _Educ: Thomas Campbell College, St. Andrew's University, BSC 1909." Her eye ran on down the small print until it came to the words "Served War of 191418." The details tallied. At the foot of the entry was an address and telephone number in Lanarkshire. The only problem was that the book was three years old, and even then he had been, Elizabeth calculated... eighty-eight.

As she had remarked to the corporal, there was no time to waste. She hurried back to her flat and made for the telephone. It rang before she could get to it.

"Hello."

"It's me."

"What?"

"Stuart."

"Oh, Stuart. How are you?"

"I'm fine. How are you?"

"Oh, you know. Fine, thanks. Quite busy." Elizabeth paused so that Stuart could tell her why he had rung. He said nothing, so she chattered a bit more. Still he said nothing when it was his turn to speak. Eventually she said, "Well. Was there something, you know... in particular?"

"I didn't know I needed a reason to ring." He sounded affronted. "I just rang for a chat."

It was not the first time he had rung for a chat and then said nothing. Perhaps he was shy, Elizabeth thought, as she talked on about what she had been doing. She found it difficult to say good-bye to people without at least pretending that they would soon be meeting, and she found by the time she put the receiver down that she had invited Stuart to dinner.

"You must come round some time," she said .7 "Must I?" he said. "When?"

"Well... God. What about Saturday?"

It didn't matter. She liked him. She would have time to cook something. Meanwhile she pulled the envelope from her bag and started to dial the Scottish number.

As her finger returned to zero she pictured a cold, grey farmhouse in Lanarkshire where an ancient telephone would ring thunderously on the hall table and a very old man would have to lever himself from an armchair several rooms away and make painful progress down the corridor, only to be confronted with a complete stranger asking him questions about a war he had fought in sixty years ago.

It was ridiculous. Her nerve failed her and she cut the connection. She went into the kitchen and poured some gin over three ice cubes and a slice of lemon. She added a dribble of tonic, lit a cigarette, and went back into the sitting room.

What was it all for? She wanted to find out what had happened to her grandfather so that she could... what? Understand more about herself? Be able to tell her notional children about their heritage? Perhaps it was just a whim, but she was determined. The worst that could result from the telephone call was embarrassment. It didn't seem a very fearful price.

She dialled again, and heard the number ring. Eight, nine, ten times it rang. Fourteen, fifteen. Surely even the lamest old man would by now have--"Hello?" It was a woman's voice. For some reason Elizabeth was surprised.

"Oh, is that... is that Mrs. Gray?"

"Speaking." The voice had a slight Edinburgh accent. It sounded distant and very old. Joyce Amelia.

"I'm very sorry to bother you. My name is Elizabeth Benson. I have a rather peculiar request. My grandfather fought in the same company as your husband in the First World War and I'm trying to find out something about him." Mrs. Gray said nothing. Elizabeth wondered if she had heard.

"I know it's a very odd thing to ask," she said. "And I really am sorry to trouble you. I just didn't know who else to ring. Hello? Are you there?"

"Yes. I'll go and fetch my husband. You'll have to be patient. And do speak up. He's a wee bit deaf."

Elizabeth felt her palms prickle with nervous excitement as Mrs. Gray set down the receiver with a heavy Bakélite thud. She pictured it lying on the hall table, beneath the draughty wooden staircase. She waited for a minute, then another minute. Eventually a quavery but loud voice came on the line.

Elizabeth explained again. Gray could not hear her, so she went through it for a third time, shouting out her grandfather's name.

"What do you want to know about all that for? Good heavens, it was years ago." He sounded annoyed.

"I'm sorry, I really don't mean to be a nuisance, it's just that I'm anxious to get in touch with someone who knew him and to find out what he was like." Gray made a snorting sound at the other end.

"Do you remember him? Did you fight with him?"

"Yes, I remember."

"What was he like?"

"Like? Like? What was he like? God knows. You don't want to go into all that now."

"But I do. Please. I really need to know."

There were more noises from Gray's end of the line. Eventually he said,

"Dark-haired. Tall. He was an orphan or something. He was superstitious. Is that the chap?"

"I don't know!" Elizabeth found herself bellowing. She wondered if Mrs. Kyriades was enjoying the conversation through the wall. "I want you to tell me!"

"Wraysford. God... " There was some more snorting. Then Gray said, "He was a strange man. I do remember him. He was a tremendous fighter. Quite unbelievable nerve. He never seemed very happy about it. Something worried him." Elizabeth said, "Was he a kind man, was he a good friend to the other men?" She did not think she had the army terminology right, but it was the best she could do.

"Kind? Dear me." Gray seemed to be laughing. "Self-contained I would say."

"Was he... funny?"

"Funny? It was a war! What an extraordinary question."

"But did he have a sense of humour, do you think?"

"I suppose so. Pretty dry, even to a Scot like me."

Elizabeth could sense Gray beginning to recall; she pressed him. "What else do you remember? Tell me everything."

"Never wanted to go on leave. Said he had no home to go to. He liked France. I remember visiting him in hospital when he'd been wounded. Must have been nineteen fifteen. No, nineteen sixteen."

Gray spent some minutes trying to date the visit while Elizabeth fruitlessly interrupted.

"So is there anything else? Did he have any friends? Anyone I could speak to now who would remember him?"

"Friends? I don't think so. No, there was some sapper. I can't remember his name. He was a loner."

"But a good soldier."

The line crackled as Gray considered.

"He was a terrific fighter, but that's not quite the same thing." Mrs. Gray's voice came back on the line. "I'm sorry, but I'm going to have to take my husband away now. He isn't used to this kind of thing and I don't want him to get tired out. Do you understand?"

"I do," said Elizabeth. "I'm very grateful to you both. I do hope I haven't been a nuisance."

"Not at all," said Mrs. Gray. "There's a man my husband used to write to. His name was Brennan. He was in a Star and Garter veterans' home in Southend. It's not far from London."

"Thank you very much. You've been very kind."

"Good-bye."

There was the sound of a receiver rattling in its cradle.

In the silence Elizabeth could hear the thump of music from the flat upstairs. The Swedish sedan had again failed to start, and Elizabeth was compelled to take the train from Fenchurch Street, one of British Rail's recent corridorless variety, with new orange plush on the seats. She brought a cup of coffee down the rocking carriage, wincing as the boiling fluid seeped out from under the lid and onto her hand. When it was cool enough to drink, she found its taste merge into the atmosphere of diesel fumes and cigarette ends, so it was hard to tell where one ended and the next began. The heating was turned up full and most of the people in the carriage seemed on the point of unconsciousness as they looked out of the window at the flatlands of Essex sliding past.

Elizabeth had telephoned the matron of the home, who told her that Brennan was barely worth visiting, but that he would see her if she came. She felt excited by the prospect of actually meeting someone from that era. She would be like a historian who, after working from other histories, finally lays hands on original source material. She had an unclear picture of Brennan in her mind. Although she knew he would be old and, to judge from what the matron had said, decrepit, she still envisaged him in uniform, with a gun.

It was raining when she emerged from the station in Southend. She opened the door of a blue Vauxhall taxi in the forecourt. The car moved off over the glistening streets, along the front with its long, dejected pier and crumbling Regency hotels. As they went up the hill, the driver pointed out toward the sands, where a cockle boat was fishing with an attachment that looked like a giant vacuum hose trailing over the edge.

The home was a large Victorian building of red brick just visible beneath the pattern of fire escapes. Elizabeth paid the driver and went inside. There were stone steps leading up to a reception desk. Huge, high-ceilinged corridors led off in either direction. The receptionist was a plump woman with a mauve cardigan and tortoiseshell glasses.

"Is he expecting you?"

"Yes, I think so. I spoke to the matron, Mrs. Simpson."

The receptionist dialled two digits on the telephone. "Yes. Visitor for Brennan. All right. Yes." She put the phone down. "Someone'll come for you," she said to Elizabeth. She picked up the magazine she had been reading.

Elizabeth looked down and brushed a crumb from her skirt.

A woman in a nurse's uniform came up and introduced herself as Mrs. Simpson.

"You're for Brennan, aren't you? If you'd like to step into my office a moment." They went a few yards down the corridor and into a small overheated room with filing cabinets. There was a calendar on the wall with a picture of a kitten in a basket. On top of a table was a spider plant whose green and white shoots trailed down almost to the floor.

"You haven't been here before, have you?" said Mrs. Simpson. She was a surprisingly young woman with peroxided hair and red lipstick. The uniform sat oddly on her.

"What you have to understand is that some of the men have been here almost all their lives. This is all they know, all they remember." She stood up and took out a file from the cabinet. "Yes. Here we are. He was admitted in nineteen nineteen, your Mr. Brennan. Discharged nineteen twenty-one. Returned nineteen twenty-three. He's been here ever since, paid for by the government. No surviving family. Sister died in nineteen fifty."

Elizabeth calculated. He had been there almost sixty years.

"They're very ignorant, most of the old-timers. They haven't kept up at all with what's been happening in the world. We do encourage radio and newspapers but they can't follow them."

"And what exactly is wrong with Mr. Brennan?"

"Amputation," said Mrs. Simpson. "Let me see. Yes. Injury sustained during final offensive, October nineteen eighteen. Shell blast. Left leg amputated in field hospital. Returned to England. Hospital Southampton. Moved to North Middlesex, then Roehampton. Admitted September nineteen nineteen. Also shell shock. Do you know what that means?"

"Psychological damage?"

"Yes, it's a catchall expression. Soft in the head. Some of them got over it, some of them didn't."

"I see. And will he know who I am? I mean, if I explain why I've come?"

"I'm not sure I've quite made myself clear." Mrs. Simpson's genteel voice took on an exasperated edge. "This man lives in a world of his own. They all do. They have no interest in the outside world at all. Some of them can't help it, of course. But everything's done for them. Meals, toilet, everything."

"Does he have many visitors?"

Mrs. Simpson laughed. "Many visitors? Oh dear. His last visitor was... " She consulted the file on her desk. "His sister. In nineteen forty-nine." Elizabeth looked down at her hands.

"Well, I'll take you along to see him, if you're ready. Don't expect too much, will you?"

They walked down the green linoleum of the corridor. The brickwork was tiled to waist height on either side, then met high overhead in a semi-cylindrical shape from which hung yellow lights on long plaited flexes.

They turned one corner, then another, past piled laundry baskets, past a pair of swing doors from behind which came a sudden burst of cabbage and gravy before the more general smell of disinfectant reasserted itself. They arrived at a blue-painted door.

"This is the dayroom," said Mrs. Simpson. She pushed open the door. There were a number of old men sitting round the edge of the room, some in wheelchairs, some in armchairs covered with pale brown plastic.

"He's over by the window."

Elizabeth went across the room, trying not to breathe too deeply of the hot stagnant air, which smelt of urine. She approached a small man in a wheelchair with a rug over his thighs.

She held out her hand to him. He looked up and took it.

"Not that one," said Mrs. Simpson from the doorway. "Next window." Elizabeth let go of the man's hand with a smile and moved down the room a few paces. There was an orange-and-brown-patterned carpet over the centre of the floor. She wished she hadn't come.

The little man in the wheelchair was like a_ _bird on its perch. He had thick glasses bound on one side with adhesive tape. Elizabeth could see his blue eyes watering behind them.

She held out her hand. He made no movement, so she took his hand from his lap and squeezed it.

She felt self-conscious and intrusive. Why on earth had she come? Some vanity about her imagined past, some foolish self-indulgence. She pulled up a chair and took Brennan's hand again.

"My name is Elizabeth Benson. I've come to visit you. Are you Mr. Brennan?" Brennan's blue eyes rolled in watery surprise. She felt him hold on to her hand. He had a tiny head. The hair was not so much grey as colourless. It lay flat and unwashed against his skull.

She made to take her hand away, but she felt him try to hang on to it, so she left it in his, and moved her chair up closer.

"I've come to see you. I've come to see you because I think you knew my grandfather. Stephen Wraysford. It was in the war. Do you remember him?" Brennan said nothing. Elizabeth looked at him. He was wearing a striped woollen shirt with the top button done up but no tie, and a hand-knitted brown cardigan. He was so small, with one leg missing; she wondered how much he weighed.

"Do you remember the war? Do you remember those days at all?" Brennan's eyes were still awash with surprise. He could clearly not grasp what was happening.

"Shall I just talk for a minute or so? Or shall we sit quietly for a bit?" He still did not answer, so Elizabeth smiled at him and laid her other hand on top of his. She shook her head so that the hair that had fallen on to her cheek was held back over her ear.

Brennan started to speak. He had a little high voice like a girl's. It came up through a weight of phlegm Elizabeth could hear moving on his chest; after every few words he took thin sips of air.

"Such fireworks. We was all there, the whole street. There was dancing. We was out all night. Barbara and me. My sister. She fell down. In the blackout it was. Had to put it up every night. Fell off a ladder."

"Your sister fell off a ladder?"

"There was that song we all sung then." He took an extra gulp of air and tried to sing it for Elizabeth.

"And do you remember anything about the war? Can you tell me anything about my grandfather?"

"The relief of Mafeking that was. They give us such a bad tea. I can't eat it. It's muck. It was that bloody Hitler." His hand was warm between hers. A tea-trolley was brought into the room and made its clanking, metal way toward them.

"All right, Tom. You got a visitor then?" boomed the woman who pushed it.

"What are you doing with a pretty girl like this? You up to your old tricks I expect. I know you, you old scoundrel. Leave it there, shall I?" She put a cup on the small table near Brennan's elbow. "He never drinks it," she said to Elizabeth. "You like a cup, love?"

"Thank you."

The trolley rattled off. Elizabeth sipped the tea. She felt her gorge rebel against the extraordinary taste and quickly put the cup back on the saucer. She looked round the room. There were perhaps twenty men in the stifling atmosphere. None of them was talking, though one was listening to a small radio. They all stared ahead of them. Elizabeth tried to imagine what it must have been like to spend sixty years in such a place, with nothing to differentiate one day from the next.

Brennan began to talk again, looping from one random recollection to another. As Elizabeth listened she could see he believed he was living in whatever era he was recalling: that time became the present for him. Most of his memories seemed to come either from the turn of the century or from the early forties and the Blitz.

She pressed him once more with her grandfather's name; if he did not respond she would leave him alone and not meddle any more with things that did not concern her.

"My brother. I brought him back all right. Always looked after him, I did."

"Your brother? Was that in the war? Did he fight with you? And my grandfather? Captain Wraysford?"

Brennan's voice piped up. "We all thought he was mad, that one. And the sapper with him. My mate Douglas, he was my mucker, he said, 'That man's strange.' But he held him when he died. They was all mad. Even Price. The CSM. The day it ended he ran out with no clothes. They put him in a loony bin. They bring me this tea, I say I don't want that. My brother's good to me, though. Caught some good fish too. I like a nice bit of fish. You should have seen the fireworks. The whole street was dancing.

His grip of time gave way again, but Elizabeth was moved by what she had heard. She had to look away from Brennan, down to the orange-and-brown carpet. It was not what he said that was important. He had told her that her grandfather had been strange, whatever that might mean in such a context; he told her they thought he and some friend of his were mad, and--though this bit was unclear--that he had comforted a dying man. She didn't feel inclined to press him for clarification, however. Even if he had been lucid enough to give it, she felt it would have made no difference. It was not what Brennan said; it was the fact that some incoherent part of him remembered. By hearing his high voice in the tiny mutilated body, she had somehow kept the chain of experience intact.

She sat, feeling great tenderness toward him, holding his hand, as the limited range of what he could recall began to play itself again. After another ten minutes she stood up to leave.

She kissed him on the cheek and walked quickly across the cavernous room. She said she would visit him again, if he liked, but she could not bear to look back at the small body in the chair where it had perched for sixty years.

Outside the high Victorian walls, she ran toward the sea. She stood on the road that overlooked the water, breathing gulps of salty air in the rain, digging her fingernails into the palms of her hands. She had rescued some vital connection, she had been successful in her small errand; what she could not do, which made her curse and wring her hands, was restore poor Brennan's life or take away the pity of the past.

*

"It's for you," said Erich, wearily proffering the telephone receiver with its tangled flex to Elizabeth. "It's a man."

"A man," said Elizabeth. "Erich, you're so precise." It was Robert. He was going to find himself unexpectedly in London that evening and wondered if she would like to come to see him in his flat.

"I'm sorry it's such short notice," he said. "I've only just found out. I don't suppose you're free."

Elizabeth was going to the cinema and then to a party somewhere in south London. "Of course I'm free," she said. "Shall I come round at about eight?"

"I'll see you then. We'll stay in, shall we? I'll buy some food."

"Don't worry. I'll get it," she said with a swiftness based on experience of Robert's shopping.

When she had disentangled her earlier arrangements, she went through into Erich's room to see if she could help him.

"So," he said, the sound causing half an inch of ash to tumble down the front of his cardigan, "the errant knight is paying a call."

"I do wish you wouldn't listen to my conversations."

"If you use the office as a centre for your social life how can I help it?"

"It's not such a very busy life, is it? One man once a month. There must be worse. Cheer up, Erich. I'll buy you lunch."

Erich sighed. "All right. But we won't go to Lucca's. I'm fed up with that man. You see the same trays of sandwich filling day after day. I think he just smears a new layer of mashed sardine over what's already in there. The bottom inch must have been there since Lucca came to London in nineteen fifty-five."

"How do you know that's when he came?"

We immigrants, you know, we stick together. We're frightened of your bloody police and your Home Office regulations. The year you arrive is important."

"Does the Home Office give you a course in how to run a sandwich bar? I mean, all these Italians from different parts of their country, all of them grew up with wonderful food and they come here and they all produce the same egg mayonnaise, the same mashed sardines in stale rolls, the same coffee that tastes of acorns, when in Italy it's like nectar. Do the immigration people give them a complete kit or what?"

"You have no respect for us wretched refugees, do you? Be careful or I'll insist you take me to the best restaurant in London."

"Anywhere you like, Erich. It's my pleasure."

"My God, that man puts you in a good mood, doesn't he? It's like ringing a bell. It's like Skinner's rats."

"Don't you mean Pavlov's dogs?"

"No, I'm an Anglo-Saxon these days. Skinner will do for me. Get back to work, will you? I'll come through at one, not a minute before."

Erich was quite right, Elizabeth thought, as she went back to her desk. Robert rang; she jumped. His voice made her happy. It was better to have some source of happiness than none, though, wasn't it? She had pushed and pulled him and tried to change his mind; she had analysed her own feelings and guessed at his; she had done everything she could to make him leave his wife, but nothing had changed. She had resigned herself to not thinking about the future. The grim conversations and the tearful partings would come back soon enough.

Robert had a small top-floor flat in a block off the Fulham Road. While he waited for Elizabeth he tried to remove traces of his family, though it was difficult to obliterate them completely. The flat had an open kitchen attached to the sitting room with a bamboo curtain dividing them. On the wooden unit between the rooms there were two Chianti bottles with red candles stuck in them, which gave it the air of a Chelsea bistro from the sixties, as Elizabeth frequently pointed out. They could not be thrown away because Robert's daughter liked them.

Half a dozen of his wife's dresses hung in the wardrobe, and there was some of her makeup in the bathroom cabinet.

He could at least remove her photograph from the sideboard and bury it beneath the tablecloths in the drawer. Each time he did this he felt a pang of superstitious guilt, as though he had stabbed her effigy. He wished her no harm; he recognized in her the qualities of dedication and generosity he feared that he himself lacked, but with Elizabeth he could not help himself.

Many of his male colleagues assumed it was an arrangement of convenience, a lighthearted sideshow of the kind the majority of them enjoyed. Robert knew that Elizabeth also thought so, however hard he tried to convince her to the contrary. When he protested that he was not that kind of man, she laughed at him. He had been unfaithful to his wife for one ill-advised night before he met Elizabeth, but with her, as he tried to explain, it was different. He believed he had married the wrong woman. He didn't want to reclaim some notional freedom, he just wanted to be with Elizabeth. He had been addicted to her initially in a physical way: a week without her body made him vague and irritable. Then the mocking confidence of her character had intrigued him. If, as she sometimes claimed, he used her just as an amusing diversion, why was it not more enjoyable? Why was there so much anguish in what his colleagues nudgingly hinted must be such fun?

He heard her ring at the intercom as he was straightening the cushions on the sofa.

"What on earth is this?" said Elizabeth, fingering his sweater.

"I had time to change out of my suit, so I--"

"Where did you get it?"

"I bought it this afternoon. I thought it was time I smartened myself up."

"Well you can get rid of that for a start. And are those flared trousers? Robert, really."

"There's not a single man in Europe who doesn't have slightly flared trousers. You can't buy any other sort in the shops."

She went into the bedroom and found some old corduroy trousers and an inoffensive sweater. Robert pretended to protest when she took control of small aspects of his life, but privately he was pleased. He admired her for knowing about such things and he was flattered that she cared enough about him for it to matter. Properly dressed, he made drinks and stood with his arm round Elizabeth as she set about cooking the food she had brought. This was the time he liked best, when everything was anticipation and the evening had not really begun. While they ate he talked about his work and the people he had met in the course of it. Elizabeth urged him on with questions. He feared boring her, but she clearly liked the sardonic way he described the various meetings and dinners he had attended.

They managed to spend an evening and a night of enclosed harmony without discussing the difficult decisions that awaited them. Robert was glad, and Elizabeth too, when she left with a light step in the morning, seemed elated.

*

On Saturday afternoon Françoise telephoned to say she had found twenty more notebooks in the attic, and Elizabeth went down at once to fetch them. She had nothing to do that evening, so she would have a long bath, not bother with dinner, but study the notebooks and see if she could make any headway where Bob had failed.

She lit the fire in the sitting room to warm it up while she was in the bath. She wondered whether some law would prevent the gas board from going on strike. Almost everyone else had at one stage during the winter, lining up to take their turn. If they stopped the gas, would the army take over the supply? She could always go and stay with her mother, who had oil-fired heating, though she would have to take Mrs. Kyriades with her, otherwise she wouldn't last a day in the cold... Elizabeth brought her mind back to the notebooks. She curled up in her dressing gown on the sofa and opened the first one. It had a date, 1915, inside the front cover. They were all dated, she discovered, from 1915 to 1917. The one she had given Bob had been from 1918, she thought. In some of them were lines of English. "Arrived back at Coy HQ at ten. Still no word from Gray about attack." Elizabeth felt a leap of excitement at the sight of the word "Gray." Again she had touched the past. It had stopped being history and had turned into experience. She flicked through the books at random. There seemed to be an almost complete and sequential record, though she noticed that after a long entry on 30 June 1916 there was nothing for two months. Had something happened? She settled her reading glasses and picked up another notebook. There was a ring at the doorbell.

She went crossly into the hall to answer the intercom. "Hello?" she said abruptly.

It cracked and fuzzed. "It's me."

"Who?"

"Stuart, of course. It's freezing."

Elizabeth was dumb. Stuart. God. She had asked him over.

"Come up. I was just... in the bath. Come on up." She pushed the button on the intercom and left the door of the flat open as she dashed into the bedroom. She ripped off her glasses, tore the combs from her hair, and wrapped the dressing gown more modestly about her. She could hear him knocking at the open door. He must have run up the stairs.

She proffered her check. "I'm sorry. I'm running a bit late."

"Hmmm," he said. "I thought I couldn't smell any enticing aromas on the stairs."

"Come in, come in. I'm sorry it's such a mess." The notebooks were open all over the floor; her breakfast coffee cup was still on the table. Short of actually having her clothes hanging in front of the fire to dry she could hardly have made it clearer that she was not expecting anyone.

Stuart appeared not to notice. "I brought you this," he said, handing her a bottle of wine. She peeled off the paper.

"Lovely," she said. "Muscadet. Is that very special? I don't know anything about wine."

"I think you'll find it's pretty good."

"You'll have to excuse me while I get dressed. I'm sorry to be so chaotic. Help yourself to a drink from the side there."

Elizabeth cursed steadily under her breath as she dressed. She pulled on a knee-length navy wool skirt she had just bought, woollen tights, and boots. She thought about the top. She didn't want to look too dowdy, but on the other hand she was going to have to go out into the freezing night to buy some food. She took a turtleneck from the drawer and an old leather jacket from the closet. There was no time for makeup. Stuart would have to take her au naturel. Terrifying thought, she murmured, as she quickly brushed her hair. This was not the kind of thing that Lindsay, who thought her so poised, would ever have imagined happening to her. She quickly fastened a pair of red earrings as she went through to the sitting room.

"Ah, what a transformation. Magnificent. You--"

"Look, I've just realized I forgot to buy any pasta. We're having pasta and I forgot the pasta. Would you believe it? So I'm just going to slip out. Is there anything you'd like while I'm there? Cigarettes? Turn on the television. Have another drink. I won't be a minute."

She managed to get out of the front door before Stuart had a chance to protest. She ran to the supermarket on Praed Street and hastily collected all she would need to make a quick dinner. She had more wine at home if Stuart's bottle was not enough for both of them. It was some red wine Robert had brought; she wasn't sure if Stuart would approve, but her shopping bag already looked suspiciously full.

"Just thought I'd buy a few other things while I was there," she explained to Stuart as she puffed through into the kitchen. She poured herself some gin and started cooking.

"What's this?" said Stuart, standing in the doorway, holding out his hand to her. "It looks like a buckle from a belt."

Elizabeth took it. _"Gott mit uns," _she read from the lettering on it.

"God with us," Stuart translated. "I found it on the carpet."

"Just something I got in a junk shop," said Elizabeth. It must have fallen out of one of the notebooks, but she didn't want to discuss it.

Once dinner was on the table Elizabeth began to relax. Stuart hadn't seemed to mind the chaos of her arrangements; in fact he had hardly seemed to notice. He was complimentary about the food and took charge of the wine himself, making sure their glasses stayed full.

"So, tell me all about yourself, Elizabeth Benson," he said, sitting back in his chair.

"I think I already have. This time and last time. Between the two I think I've covered the ground. You tell me some more about your work. You're a marketing consultant, didn't you say?"

"That's right, yes."

"What does it entail?"

"How long is a piece of string?"

"You know what I mean. Do people come to see you and ask how to sell their products? Is that what it is?"

"That's part of it. It's rather more complicated than that."

"Well, go on. Tell me. I'm sure I can follow."

"We are in the skills business. We like to see ourselves as beneficent jailers. We have a set of keys for all occasions. The keys unlock the potential of a business. We have to teach people how to use them, which key fits which lock. But above all we have to teach them how to ask the right questions."

"I see," said Elizabeth, with a slight hesitation. "So you give advice and sales go up and you take a percentage. Is that it?"

"It's more a question of seeing how each part of a business can relate to the other parts. So suppose you're in product development and Bloggs is in sales, then unless you're asking the right questions you may be pulling in different directions. I always say our main aim is to teach people not to need us."

"And how do I know when I don't need you?"

"That's a very good question."

"Is it one of the questions you would have taught me to ask?" Elizabeth felt a twitch at the corner of her mouth, which she tried to quell.

"It's not quite that simple."

"I thought it might not be. Anyway. I thought you were a musician." Stuart ran his hand back through his hair and resettled his glasses. "I am a musician," he said. "It's just that I don't make a living from it. You don't make a living from being a cook, but you're still a cook, aren't you? Do you follow?"

"I think so. You play the piano very well anyway."

"Thank you."

"I'm afraid it's only ice cream. I meant to make something, but I didn't have time. Is that all right?"

As she made coffee in the kitchen and tried to spoon the frozen ice cream from its carton without snapping the shaft off the spoon, Elizabeth was struck, not for the first time, by the thought that her life was entirely frivolous. It was a rush and slither of trivial crises; of uncertain cash flow, small triumphs, occasional sex, and too many cigarettes; of missed deadlines that turned out not to matter; of arguments, new clothes, bursts of altruism, and sincere resolutions to address the important things. Of all these and the other experiences that made up her life, the most significant aspect was the one suggested by the words "turned out not to matter." Although she was happy enough with what she had become, it was this continued sense of the easy, the inessential nature of what she did, that most irritated her. She thought of Tom Brennan, who had known only life or death, then death in life. In her generation there was no intensity. She took the coffee and the ice cream back into the sitting room. Stuart had put a record on, a Beethoven piano concerto, and was listening to it with closed eyes.

Elizabeth smiled as she put his ice cream down in front of him. She couldn't quite make up her mind about Stuart. She was impressed by his piano playing and flattered by his attention, but some part of her remained unconvinced. They sat on the sofa afterward and he explained to her, still with his eyes closed, how the piece of music was constructed and where, in his view, the soloist was going wrong.

When the record finished Elizabeth started to go and change it, but Stuart caught her by the forearm and pulled her back.

"Sit down, Liz. I have something to ask you."

"Sorry?"

"I want you to listen carefully. I don't know what you'll make of me and I'm not sure it matters too much. I'm going to tell you a story."

As Elizabeth started to interrupt he held up his hand to silence her.

"Once upon a time there was a very attractive girl. She had lots of friends, a very good job, a flat in town, and everyone envied her. Then, as time went on, her friends got married and had babies and this girl became a very attractive woman. But she didn't get married. The older she got, the more she pretended it didn't matter to her, but the more, deep down inside, she longed for children and a husband. Part of the problem was that the more she pretended, the more she frightened men off. Because they, poor little creatures, believed her when she said she was happy."

Elizabeth looked down at the floor. An unhealthy curiosity was fighting the embarrassment that ran in waves up and down her spine. Stuart himself showed no trace of self-consciousness. He looked straight ahead.

"Then one day she met a man who was not frightened at all. He was kind to her and funny and friendly. And when she really thought about it, she knew, deep down, that this was what she had always wanted. And they moved to the country and she had lots of children and they all lived happily ever after." Elizabeth swallowed. "And?"

Stuart turned around to face her. "I'm asking you to marry me. I know it's unorthodox. This is only the third time we've met and I haven't even bothered to seduce you. I'm such a sweet old-fashioned thing. You're a very unusual woman. I think you'll find, if you accept my offer, that I'm an equally unusual man." Elizabeth stood up. She took a cigarette and spluttered as she inhaled it. "It's very... nice of you. I'm flattered by the thought, but I'm afraid you've got the wrong person. I have a boyfriend. I--"

"He's married, isn't he? Let me guess. You see him once a month for hasty sex and a tearful farewell. He says he'll leave his wife, but we all know he won't, don't we? Is that what you want? Is that your future?"

Elizabeth's voice took on a frozen edge. "You shouldn't talk about people you don't know."

Stuart stood up and threw his arms open expansively. "Come on, we're both adults, we both know the score. I'm sorry if I intruded on a private sorrow, but this is a very important matter. I have money. Did I mention that? Or is it the sex thing? Do you want a trial run?"

"I _beg _your pardon?"

"Well at least give me credit for not having seduced you."

"What on earth makes you think you could have?"

Stuart shrugged suggestively. "I'm sorry, Liz. I've gone too far. I'm going to leave you now. Let's say I've planted a seed. You just do me the favour of watering it from time to time. Think about it."

He took his coat from the hook in the hall and came back into the room.

"Thank you for a marvellous evening," he said. "And will you water it, that little seed?"

"I... won't forget. I certainly won't forget."

"Good." He smiled and kissed her on the forehead, then let himself out.

*

Elizabeth was in a condition of shock for some days. The presumptuousness of what Stuart had said to her felt, in retrospect, like an unwanted physical intimacy; it was as though he had forced himself on her.

She went for long walks in Hyde Park and breathed deeply in the cold January air. She worked till late in the office. She bought, and read, two books about the war her grandfather had fought in. She made resolutions for the New Year. She would smoke less, she would visit Tom Brennan once a fortnight, if he wanted, or, if he didn't, she would visit someone else of his generation. Somehow she would repay the debt; she would complete the circle.

For the first of her New Year visits to Tom Brennan she hoped she might find out some more about her grandfather. She understood enough about Brennan's state of mind not to expect a long recollection, or even an anecdote, but she hoped for some reference at least.

She was wearing fewer clothes this time, knowing what the central heating was like in the dayroom. In view of his complaints about the food, she took Brennan a cake her mother had baked. She was struck as she packed it by how much it was like sending a parcel to a man in the trenches. She took half a bottle of whisky as well; at least that was something he wouldn't have been sent from home. She also, feeling ashamed as she did so, put two mothballs in her handkerchief, so she could hold it to her face and breathe in camphor rather than the cloying smell of urine. He was in the same place at the window. He put his hand in hers and they sat happily together. Elizabeth asked him what he had been doing in the past few weeks and what he had done in the years before that. His answers bore no relation to her questions. He talked about Mafeking night, he talked about his sister in the blackout and how she had fallen off a ladder. He told her he didn't like the food they gave him.

Occasionally she could tell that a particular question had registered with him, because his eyes showed alarm behind the thick lenses of his spectacles. He would mumble a few words, then either fall silent or resume with one of the stories he knew. Elizabeth began to suspect that she had already heard most of his repertoire. This time she didn't press him on the subject of her grandfather. She had made the first vital connection. If he had anything else to say it would come in time; in fact it was more likely to come out when he became familiar with her visits. She left him with the cake and whisky and said she would be back in two weeks' time. The matron, Mrs. Simpson, passed her in the doorway.

"I didn't think we'd see you again," she said. "Any joy?"

"Well... not joy exactly. I don't know if he liked seeing me. But I liked seeing him again. I left him a little parcel. Is that allowed?"

"It depends what's in it."

Elizabeth had a feeling the whisky would be forbidden. She left before she would have to see it being confiscated.

At home that night she did some calculations. It was a task she had been putting off, because she feared the result. With the help of last year's diary she was able to work out when her last period had been. It had definitely been in progress on the sixth of December, because she remembered being late for a lunch that was marked for that day because she had had to make a detour to find a chemist's. It was now January 21st. The last time she had seen Robert was not recorded in her diary, but it had been the week before Christmas. She remembered the decorations in the shops. In fact he had come over on his holidays a day early, which was how he had managed to squeeze her in. She had had to go to work the following day, so it must have been a weekday. She narrowed it down to the 21st or the 22nd. Either day was halfway through the cycle, which, if she remembered rightly, was the dangerous time. She tried to remember what precautions she had taken. She had been on the pill for four years continuously and her doctor had advised her to stop taking it. They had then used a variety of means. Both of them were careful, Robert neurotically so in her opinion.

The next morning she bought a pregnancy testing kit from the chemist's in Craven Road. It was a flat, rectangular piece of plastic with two windows. She took it to the bathroom, then, five minutes later, as instructed, looked at the windows. The blue line across each was firm and assertive. It was not just positive, it was bursting with life.

She passed a day in which her feelings oscillated between joy and despair. Twice she began to tell Irene her secret and twice discretion made her change the subject. She went out for lunch on her own and found her eyes brimming with tears as she ate. Already she felt an absurd passion for the invisible thing inside her. In the evening she telephoned Robert. There was no reply, but she left a message on his recently acquired answering machine telling him to ring She ran a bath and slid beneath the water. She gazed at her lower belly and wondered what microscopic events were taking place there. She was frightened of the physical changes and worried about what people would say; but much more than anxiety she felt exhilaration. Her telephone rang and she sprang from the bath and went dripping through to answer it.

It was Bob.

"I've cracked it," he said. "I'm sorry it's taken me such a long time. It was perfectly straightforward, really, once I'd figured out how the old codger's mind worked. Greek letters, French language, and a bit of private code. Elementary, my dear Watson. I can't swear I've got every name right, of course. I've marked the odd query. But it all seems to add up."

When she had overcome her disappointment that it was not Robert, Elizabeth said, "That's marvellous, Bob. Thank you very much. When can I pick it up?"

"Come over at the weekend if you like. I put a couple of pages in the post this morning. I just did the last two in the book because they were the ones I'd worked on first. They should be with you in the morning if the Post Office isn't on strike as well. You never know, do you?"

"No. Quite. Well, I'll look forward to getting those tomorrow."

"Yes," said Bob. "They're a bit gloomy, you know. Pour yourself a drink first."

"You know me, Bob. And thanks again."

Robert didn't ring till after midnight, when Elizabeth was asleep. She told him straight away that she was going to have a baby. She was too sleepy to break the news gently, as she had intended. "I won't tell anyone who the father is. These things can be kept secret," she said.

Robert was shocked.

"You could sound a bit happier about it," she said.

"Give me time," he said. "I'm happy for you, and in time I'll be happy for myself and the child. Just give me time to get used to it."

"I will," said Elizabeth. "I love you."

The next day was a Saturday and in the morning there was a package from Bob. Elizabeth put it aside till after breakfast, then opened it carefully with a knife. Bob had reused a brown envelope from an old catalogue or circular, sticking a white label with her name and address over his own.

Inside were two large sheets of thin, crackling white paper. Elizabeth was very excited. From the moment she saw the black ink of Bob's careful script, she knew that she had found what she wanted.

Gray's old voice barking down the line from Lanarkshire had been good; the glimpse of memory through the chaos of Brennan's recollection had been thrilling. But finally she had what she wanted: the past was alive in the spidery letters in her slightly shaking hand. She read: I don't know how the days pass. The anger and the blood have gone. We sit and read. There is always someone sleeping, someone strolling. Food is brought. We don't read real books, only magazines. Someone is eating. There are always others unaccounted for or absent.

Since Weir[?] died I have not been very close to reality. I am in a wilderness beyond fear. Time has finally collapsed for me. I had a letter from Jeanne this morning. She said two months have passed since we met.

Men come out from England like emissaries from an unknown land. I cannot picture what it means to be at peace. I do not know how people there can lead a life.

The only things that sometimes jolt us back from this trance are memories of men. In the set of the eyes of some conscripted boy I see a look of Douglas or

[name illeg. Reeve?] I find myself rigid with imagining. I can see that man's skull opening as he bent down to his friend that summer morning-Yesterday a signaller came up to talk and his gestures reminded me of W. I had a clear picture of him, not sprawling in the mud as I last saw him, but emerging from his burrow in the ground, wild-eyed. The image lasted only for an instant, then time collapsed and drifted past me once again.

I have been summoned to see Gray tomorrow. Perhaps he will feel the same. We are not contemptuous of gunfire, but we have lost the power to be afraid. Shells will fall on the reserve lines and we will not stop talking. There is still blood, though no one sees. A boy lay without legs where the men took their tea from the cooker. They stepped over him.

I have tried to resist the slide into this unreal world, but I lack the strength. I am tired. Now I am tired in my soul.

Many times I have lain down and I have longed for death. I feel unworthy. I feel guilty because I have survived. Death will not come and I am cast adrift in a perpetual present.

I do not know what I have done to live in this existence. I do not know what any of us did to tilt the world into this unnatural orbit. We came here only for a few months.

No child or future generation will ever know what this was like. They will never understand.

When it is over we will go quietly among the living and we will not tell them. We will talk and sleep and go about our business like human beings. We will seal what we have seen in the silence of our hearts and no words will reach us._

FRANCE 1918--PART SIX

Stephen put away his pen and notebook. It was nighttime. There was moonlight on the hills above the village. He lit another cigarette and turned the pages of a magazine. There was a pile by the chair of others he had already skimmed. His eyes scanned each page but barely read.

He went outside into the yard behind the little house. Chickens scattered in front of his footsteps.

He went into the lane and began to walk. The road was only partially completed. He felt the puddles and the loose stones beneath his feet. He went as far as the main road and looked around him. The guns were soft and distant; they rumbled like a train going through an embankment.

He stood and breathed deeply. He could hear an owl's call. He went slowly up and down the lane. The owl reminded him of childhood; it was a noise boys would make with their hands. His own seemed so long ago that it felt as though someone else had lived it for him.

Back in the billet he found Mountford sitting at the table, playing cards with a lieutenant called Tylecote. He declined their offer of a game, but sat in a daze and watched them move the greasy pictures over the wooden surface.

In the morning he went to see Colonel Gray in battalion headquarters two miles away.

Gray sprang up when Stephen went into the room. "Wraysford! How good to see you again. Civil of you staff men to pay us a call."

Gray had changed little in appearance. He gave the impression of an enquiring terrier with its head on one side. His moustache and hair showed patches of white, but his movements were still swift and certain.

He pulled back a chair and gestured to Stephen, who sat down.

"Do smoke," he said. "Now then. Are you enjoying yourself with your wee maps and lists?"

Stephen breathed in deeply. "We... exist."

"Exist? Good heavens, that's not the sort of talk I'm used to from a frontline man like yourself."

"I suppose not. If you remember, sir, I didn't ask to be transferred."

"I remember very well. In my view you were battle-weary. Mind you, most people were never allowed to reach that stage. A bullet saw to that."

"Yes. I've been lucky." Stephen coughed as the cigarette smoke went down into his lungs.

Gray looked out of the window and swung his feet up on to the desk. "Our lot have done pretty well, you know. Terrible casualties on the Somme, but who didn't? Otherwise not too bad. Both battalions are pretty much back to full strength."

"Yes I know," said Stephen. He smiled. "I know quite a lot about troop strengths in this area. More than when I was fighting."

Gray nodded his head quickly up and down and tapped his teeth with a pen.

"Tell me," he said, "when the war is over and the regiment puts up a memorial, what words will we inscribe on it?"

"I don't know. I presumed there would be a divisional memorial. The regiment would list the actions it was in, I suppose."

"Yes," said Gray. "It's a proud list, isn't it?" Stephen did not answer. He felt no pride in the unspeakable names.

Gray said, "Well, I've good news for you. Your staff attachment is finished. You're coming back." He paused. "I thought that's what you wanted."

"I... yes, I suppose it is."

"You don't look very pleased."

"I can't be pleased by anything that carries on this war. But I'm not displeased. I'm indifferent."

"Now listen to me. Quite soon we are going to attack. On a long front we are going to move rapidly forward into Germany. Parts of the line have already started to advance, as you know. If you want to lead your old company, you can. The temporary OC will become your second-in-command."

Stephen sighed and said nothing. He wished he felt pleased or excited. Gray stood up and came round the desk. "Think of the words on that memorial, Wraysford. Think of those stinking towns and foul bloody villages whose names will be turned into some bogus glory by fat-arsed historians who have sat in London. We were there. As our punishment for God knows what, we were there, and our men died in each of those disgusting places. I hate their names. I hate the sound of them and the thought of them, which is why I will not bring myself to remind you. But listen." He put his face close to Stephen's. "There are four words they will chisel beneath them at the bottom. Four words that people will look at one day. When they read the other words they will want to vomit. When they read these, they will bow their heads, just a little. 'Final advance and pursuit.' Don't tell me you don't want to put your name to those words."

Stephen laughed. "I really don't mind what--"

"Go _on." _Gray growled at him like a dog. "There must be one of those words you like the sound of."

Stephen said, "I suppose so. 'Final.' "

Gray shook him by the shoulders. "Good man. I'll tell the men you're on your way."

*

The work of the tunnellers reached its climax with the explosion at Messines Ridge. Weir's company was absorbed by the three RE Field Companies attached to the division in which Stephen served. The work was less arduous and less interesting. Jack Firebrace wrote: Dear Margaret, These are just a few lines while I have a moment. Thank you for the parcel which got here yesterday, though it was slightly damaged. Did you put in razor blades?

We are on road repair work again. It is very hard work, though most of the men think it better than tunnelling. We have to fill big holes with stones and what they call facines, which are bits of spoil, masonry and suchlike, from damaged houses.

What with the mire and the rain and all the dead animals, it is a sorry business. We feel sorry for the dead horses, such beautiful animals so badly knocked about and they didn't ask for any part of it.

We still do a bit of digging. The CO says we've made our contribution to the war, but that it's going to become a much faster business fought above the ground now. We'll see about that. We have started to advance now and there is a real feeling that one more push and it will be over.

We are all keeping cheerful and bright. Evans has had a new pack of cards and I am quite the star turn at brag now. I have also done some more sketching. Trusting you are keeping well and that I will see you again soon.

From your loving husband Jack.

Before he rejoined his company, Stephen took two of the days owing to him in leave and went to Rouen, where Jeanne had moved during the German spring offensive. It was a hot Sunday afternoon when he arrived. There was a festive atmosphere in the streets. Old motor cars were taking families for a drive. Others had four-in-hands, carts, or bicycles--anything to keep their promenade moving. There were numbers of small boys running on the cobbles and shouting to the drivers of the vehicles.

Stephen moved through the crowd in some puzzlement. Following Jeanne's instructions, he came to the cathedral and turned into the medieval part of the city, where she had taken a room until she could return to Amiens.

She was waiting for him when he rang the street bell. She took him across a courtyard and up to her lodgings. There were only two rooms on the first floor, but she had managed to make them pleasant with the things she had been able to take out of Amiens.

She sat him down in one of the two armchairs and looked at him. He had grown very thin and his skin had become lined and leathery about the eyes. Their expression was no longer guarded; to Jeanne it seemed vacant. He had not lost any hair, even at the temples, but there were now streaks of early grey almost everywhere in it. His movements had a dreamlike quality, as though the air about him were very thick and had to be pushed slowly back. He smoked without seeming to know that he did so and dropped ash on his clothes.

This was the man who eight years earlier had so stirred her younger sister. Isabelle had told her nothing about their lovemaking, but she had given Jeanne a strong physical sense of him by referring to his shoulders, his eyes, and the deft movements of his hands. The man Jeanne saw was different; it was hard to believe it was the same person. This thought made her feel easier in her mind. They went for a walk in the town and then to the museum, where they sat in the gardens.

"What happened to you in the spring?" said Stephen. "I had no letters for a time."

"I did write," said Jeanne. "Perhaps they got lost in all the commotion. To begin with the town was filled with refugees from other places as the Germans advanced. Then we were bombarded and the mayor gave the order to evacuate the town. I stayed for a time because I didn't want to come back to Rouen. They used to shell at night, using flares to guide their fire. It was frightening. I went to the cathedral to help them take out the stained-glass windows. We wrapped them all up in blankets. Eventually I had to leave, but I didn't tell my parents where I'd gone. I managed to find these rooms with the help of a friend I'd known when I was a girl. My parents don't know I'm here."

"Would they be angry?"

"I don't know. I think they've almost given up hope with their daughters. They heard that Isabelle had gone to Germany. They had a letter from an old friend of Azaire's in Amiens, a man called Bérard. He said he thought they ought to know." Stephen sang softly, " 'And the little boat sailed away-y-y.' "

"What was that?"

"I knew that man. He used to visit when I was there. He was a_ _bully, a preposterous little man, full of his own importance. But he seemed to have some sort of power over people."

"I wrote to Isabelle and told her what had happened. She wrote back and told me that when the place was first occupied by the Germans this man Bérard offered the commandant his house to live in. He thought they would be staying there for the whole war. When they moved on after a few days he was left feeling shamefaced. According to Isabelle he tried to make up for it afterward by making very belligerent noises."

"But he didn't join the army?"

"No. Perhaps he was too old. Isabelle said she was happy, though Max is not well. He had to have his leg amputated and he has not recovered his strength. She's very devoted to him."

Stephen nodded. "Poor man. I'm sorry."

"Now what about you?" said Jeanne. She took his hand and squeezed it in her affectionate, sisterly way. "You're looking very distracted and pale. I worry about you. I told you that, didn't I? I don't suppose you're eating properly either." Stephen smiled. "I'm all right. The food was much better in the job I've just finished. There was plenty of it, too."

"Then why are you so thin?"

He shrugged. "1 don't know."

Jeanne's dark eyes lit up with seriousness as she pressed his hand and made him look at her. "Stephen, you mustn't give up. You mustn't let yourself go. It's nearly over. Any day now we'll advance and you'll be free to resume your life."

"Resume? I can't remember my life. I wouldn't know where to look for it."

"You mustn't talk in this way." Jeanne was angry. Her pale skin showed, for the first time since Stephen had known her, a pinpoint of blood in the cheeks. With her left hand she lightly beat the wooden bench on which they were sitting to emphasize what she said.

"Of course you won't resume whatever it was you were doing in Paris, drifting around as a carpenter or whatever it was. You'll do something better, you'll do something worthwhile."

Stephen turned his eyes slowly to her. "You're a dear woman, Jeanne. I would do what you say. But it's not the details of a life I've lost. It's the reality itself." Jeanne's eyes filled with tears. "Then we must make it come back. I'll bring it back for you. I'll help you find whatever it is you have lost. Nothing is beyond redemption."

"Why are you so kind to me?" said Stephen.

"Because I love you. Can't you see that? From all that's gone wrong I want to make something good. We must try. Promise me you'll try."

Stephen nodded slowly. "We will try."

Jeanne stood up, feeling encouraged. She took his hand and led him through the gardens. What else could she do to invigorate him, to bring him back to the reality he had lost? There was one thing, naturally; though the complications might outweigh the benefits. It should happen spontaneously or not at all. They had dinner early in a restaurant on their way back to her lodgings and she made Stephen drink wine in the hope that it would cheer him. Glass after glass of red Bordeaux went down his throat but brought no light into his dead eyes. On the way home Jeanne said, "Please be very quiet as we cross the courtyard. I don't want the concierge to know there's a man staying the night in my rooms."

Stephen laughed for the first time. "You Fourmentier girls. What would your father say?"

"Be quiet," said Jeanne, glad that she had made him laugh. It was a hot night, and it was not yet dark as they walked. A small band was playing in one of the squares among the plane trees, where the cafés were starting to put on their lights.

Stephen went with elaborate care over the paving of the courtyard and made no sound until they were safely back in Jeanne's lodgings.

"I've made up a bed for you on the sofa in the corner. Do you want to go to bed now or would you like to sit up and talk? I think I have some brandy. We could take it on to the little balcony there. But we must keep our voices down." They sat in two wickerwork chairs on the narrow strip that gave a view over a dry, sandy garden.

"You know what I want to do for you?" said Jeanne. "I'm going to make you laugh. That's going to be my project. I'm going to banish your Anglo-Saxon gloom. I'm going to make you laugh and be full of joy, like a proper French peasant." Stephen smiled. He said, "And I'll tell stories and slap my thighs like a Norman farmer."

"And never think about the war. And those who have gone."

"Never." He drained the brandy in a gulp.

She took his hand again. "I'll have a house with a garden at the back with rose bushes and flowerbeds, and perhaps a swing for children to play on--if not my own, then visiting children. The house will have long windows and be full of the smell of wonderful meals from the kitchen. And the sitting room will have freesias and violets. And there will be paintings on the wall, by Millet and Courbet and other great artists."

"I'll visit you. Perhaps I'll live there with you. It will shock the whole of Rouen."

"We'll go boating on Sunday, and on Saturday we'll go to the opera, then to dinner in the big square. Twice a year we'll have parties in the house. They'll be full of candles, and we'll hire servants to take round drinks on silver trays to all our friends. And there will be dancing and--"

"Not dancing."

"All right, no dancing. But there'll be a band. Perhaps a string quartet or a gipsy violinist. And those who _want _to can dance, somewhere in a separate room. Perhaps we'll have a singer."

"Perhaps we could persuade Bérard."

"A good idea. He could sing some German lieder he had learned from the commandant and his wife. The parties would be famous. I'm not sure how we'd pay for them."

"I'll have made my fortune by some invention. Your father will have left his millions to you."

They drank some more brandy, which made Jeanne feel dizzy, though it seemed to have no effect on Stephen. When it grew cold they went inside and Stephen said he would like to sleep. She showed him his bed and fetched him a carafe of water.

In her bedroom Jeanne undressed. She felt encouraged by Stephen, though she could see he was making efforts for her benefit. It was a beginning. She walked naked across the floor to take her nightgown from the back of the door. It opened just before she reached it, and she saw Stephen outside in his shirt, his legs bare.

He recoiled. "I'm sorry, I was looking for the bathroom." Jeanne had grabbed reflexively for a towel that lay on the chair, and tried to arrange it modestly over her body.

Stephen turned and began to move back into the sitting room.

Jeanne said, "Stop. It's all right. Come back."

She put the towel on the chair and stood quite still.

There was no light in the room, but the brightness of the autumn night made it easy to see.

"Come and let me hold you," she said. The slow smile rose up and illuminated her face.

Stephen walked slowly into the room. Jeanne's long thin body stood to welcome him. Her pale arms were held out, pulling up the round breasts that rode like mysterious white flowers on her ribcage in the uncertain light. Stephen went and knelt at her feet. He put his head against her side, beneath her ribs. She was hoping that his forced lightness of spirit would still be with him. He put his arms round her thighs. The soft hair that grew up between her legs was long and black. He laid his cheek against it for a moment, then put his face back against her side. She felt him begin to sob. "Isabelle," he was saying,

"Isabelle."

*

When Stephen returned to his company in the forward area there were celebrations. The men were guardedly hopeful that their next attack would be their last, and after the events on the Ancre and the advance on the canal Stephen had acquired a reputation for survival. Even the enlisted men who had joined since he had been away were aware that he was regarded as a lucky charm. Exaggerated rumours reached them of the witchcraft he performed in his dugout.

The engineers and tunnellers came up infrequently to do trench maintenance. A long tunnel out into no-man's-land was periodically inspected and repaired. Its furthest point provided an entrance to a useful if dangerous listening post close to German lines, apparently still undiscovered by the enemy. Men positioned in it had heard talk from the German front line. It had been of retreat. Enemy shelling followed a pattern. It was accurately aimed at the rear area, with little danger to the front line, and stopped for an hour at lunchtime. The British reply observed the same formalities, so Stephen was able to eat peacefully on his first day back. Riley had heated up some tinned stew, but had managed to find a fresh cabbage to enliven it.

Cartwright, the officer commanding the engineers, came to see him in the afternoon. Although he was regarded as a weak character by the infantry, he had a sense of grievance that made him a tenacious arguer.

"As you know," he said, "we have an agreement to help each other, though as far as I can see there has been little give-and-take about it." He had a pale face with a receding chin; he favoured familiar domestic phrases and proverbs in the hope that they would make his arguments seem more palatable.

"Now I've received an order that my men are to enlarge the listening post at the end of the main drive. That's all well and good, but the last men I had down there said they heard what sounded like enemy work going on just above them."

"I see. So you're saying you want some of my men to go down with you."

"Yes. I think we're entitled to it."

"I thought all the digging had stopped."

"You never know with our friends the Boche, do you?"

"I suppose not. It seems a bit unnecessary, but--"

"'I thought that since you'd been away you'd like to see what's been going on for yourself. After all, the work is done for the protection of your men."

"You're as bad as Weir. Why are you always so keen to get us underground?"

"Because we dug you proper drains here and made this dugout." Cartwright gestured to the wooden walls and the bookshelf above the bed. "You don't think your men could have done this, do you?"

"All right," said Stephen. "I'll come and inspect it, but I can't be away for more than an hour. One of your men will have to bring me back."

"I'm sure that can be arranged. We're going down at midday tomorrow." The autumn light showed the blackened, splintered stumps of what had been trees. The floor of the trench was for once reasonably dry when the men assembled at the tunnel head.

Jack Firebrace, Evans, and Jones were among six experienced tunnellers who handed out helmets, torches, and Proto breathing sets to the infantry. Cartwright said to Jack, "You're to escort Captain Wraysford back after he's inspected the work, Firebrace."

"Aren't you coming?" said Stephen, putting an electric torch in his pocket.

"Wouldn't do to have us both down there," said Cartwright. Stephen looked up at the sky above him. It was a clear, pale blue with a few high clouds. The tarpaulin-draped entrance to the burrow was dark.

He was thinking of the first time he had gone underground with Hunt and Byrne to protect Jack Firebrace. He remembered the pale light of panic in Hunt's face and the impact of his own wounds. He himself had changed since then; he could no longer be sure that he would be as calm in the narrow tunnels that awaited them. He rested his hands on the wooden revetting that held the front wall of the trench and breathed in deeply. There were no distinct worlds, only one creation, to which he was bound by the beating of his blood. It would be the same underground as here in the warm air, with the birds singing and the gentle clouds above them. He clambered in after the tunnellers and felt the splintering wood of the ladder against his hands. The drop was vertical and the rungs were far apart. Stephen hesitated as he lowered his feet into the darkness, but was forced to continue by the boots that kept treading down close to his fingers. The light at the top of the tunnel was obscured by their large, descending bulk, and eventually narrowed to something like a distant windowpane, then to nothing.

He heard Jack's voice below him telling him how much further he had to go. Eventually he jumped off the ladder and fell to the earth on a platform about ten feet square, where Jack and two of the infantry were waiting with lamps. When the others had arrived, some timber was lowered down. Jones and Evans took it from the end of the dangling rope and prepared to carry it forward into the tunnel. Three tunnellers led the way, with the other three at the back and the six reluctant infantry in between. The tunnel was at first high enough to stand up in and they made good progress over the dry, chalky floor. After about fifty yards, the senior miner, a Scottish lieutenant called Lorimer, told them they were to be quiet from then on. They were coming to a long lateral gallery from which led various tunnels going toward the enemy. To begin with they would all go down the main one, which led to the forward listening post; later, when the men were working to enlarge it, the infantry would be required to go into a parallel tunnel to protect them. They would be able to take a miner with them to show the way. All were equipped with lamps.

They went down on their knees to get into the main section and Stephen saw the anxious glances being exchanged among his men. The air had a dense, damp quality. They strained and gasped as they went through a small opening, but then found they could half-stand again and proceeded at a crouch. Stephen noticed the solid horizontal planks attached to verticals at distances of about five feet. From what he could see it had been well done. In the accustomed scamper of the tunnellers there was no fear or sense of the unusual.

The six infantrymen, led by a lieutenant called Crawshaw, were struggling to keep up with those in front. Stephen could hear them gasping. They carried rifles, which made it difficult for them to use their hands to steady themselves. It seemed a_ _strange way, Stephen thought, in which to have passed the war, like rodents in a separate element. It had shielded them from the impact of the big attacks and the sight of bodies piling up, but the world the miners inhabited had its own ingrained horror.

He would go just as far as the main chamber, then insist on getting back to his men. They would be grateful that he had made the gesture, which would secure the continued cooperation of the tunnellers in the jobs they found most wearing. The tunnel became narrower and they were obliged to go down on all fours again. The front men suddenly stopped, causing the others to crush.

"I think they've heard something," Crawshaw whispered into Stephen's ear.

"No one move."

The men lay huddled in the tube of earth as Evans fumbled in his pack and squeezed through them to get up to his three colleagues at the front. After a whispered consultation, Evans squirmed forward to a piece of dry wall and stuck a flat disc against it, into which he plugged a stethoscope. Crawshaw raised a finger to his lips and made a downward motion with both hands. The others lay flat on the floor of the tunnel. Stephen felt a stone against his cheek, and tried to shift his head. He was lodged up against the leg of someone he could not see and had to stay where he was. He could feel his heart moving slowly against his ribs. Evans lay tight against the tunnel wall, like an unwashed and unqualified doctor listening for signs of hostile life.

Stephen closed his eyes. He wondered whether, if he stayed in this position long enough, he might drift off to a final sleep. The agitation of the other men prevented him from sliding into his own thoughts. He could sense their fear through the tension of the bodies that pressed against his. It was their passivity that made it difficult; even against the guns they had some chance of riposte, but beneath this weight they were helpless.

Evans eventually pulled the stethoscope out of his ears and folded it back into his pocket. He shook his head and pursed his lips. He whispered his report to his lieutenant, who in turn put his mouth to Stephen's ear.

"Can't hear anything. It may have been shellfire from the surface. We're going to press on."

The men on the floor of the tunnel stirred and dragged themselves back again into their crouching positions, in which they could again advance deeper. Stephen could feel himself sweating. He could tell by the stench from the bodies packed in around him that he was not the only one. Trench conditions had improved, but not to the extent of providing the men with means of washing, even in hot weather.

The roof of the tunnel began to lift a little, and the smaller men, such as Evans and Jones, were able to walk upright. They came to a junction where the miners' lieutenant, Lorimer, issued instructions. The main digging party would proceed straight to the listening chamber; the others would go into one of the fighting tunnels alongside, the entrance to which he was now able to point out. Stephen smiled to himself as he saw the expressions on the faces of his men. They exaggerated their reluctance into comic grimaces, but he knew from his own experience that it was real enough. He was glad he was going into what, presumably, would be the largest section of tunnel He had no fear of going forward provided he felt he could get back. What had frightened him underground with Weir was when the earth fell behind them and he had for a moment thought he would not be able to turn round.

Crawshaw checked that his men had their grenades and rifles. He himself carried a revolver, which he waved dangerously toward the tunnel entrances. Stephen guessed he was trying to show them how fearless he was. Perhaps they believed him.

He watched them depart. He remembered the feelings of tenderness he used to have for the men when they went into battle or on patrol; he used to imagine their lives and hopes, their homes and their families, the little worlds they carried on their backs and in their minds. He could remember this compassion, but he no longer felt it.

His own party was about twenty-five yards short of the main listening chamber when Lorimer again came to a halt and raised his finger to his lips. Stephen inhaled tightly. He was beginning to regret having come down. Either Lorimer was nervous, and was turning a routine inspection into something protracted and unpleasant, or else there was real danger. Evans had taken his listening set into the adjacent tunnel. Jack Firebrace was summoned by Lorimer to place his ear against the wall.

Jack covered the other ear with his hand and closed his eyes for better concentration. For half a minute they all stood motionless. In the light of a miner's lamp, Stephen stared with minute intensity at the grain of a piece of timber about six inches from his face. He traced the tiny lines and indentations. He imagined how it would curl beneath a plane.

Jack pulled back his head from the wall and wheeled to face Lorimer. His urgent whisper was audible to all of them.

"There's footsteps, going back toward their lines. They've got a tunnel west and about ten feet up."

Lorimer's face tightened. He said nothing for a moment, then, "Retreating, did you say?"

"Yes."

"Then I think we should press on and do our work."

"Yes," said Jack, "but they may have laid a charge. I mean, there are any number of reasons why--"

"We'll wait for five minutes," said Lorimer, "then we'll proceed."

"For God's sake," said Stephen. "You don't risk the lives of all these men to--" The air was driven from his chest before he could complete the sentence as an explosion drove them backward into the tunnel walls; it was as though the soil in front of them had been hurled back by some violent, compacted earthquake. Stephen's head struck wood. By the jagged light that burned into the earth he saw the flailing limbs and flying parts of cloth and kit, helmets, hands, and spitting chalk that ricocheted round the hollow tube, taking the human detritus with it in a roar of condensed fury.

He lay on the tunnel floor beneath the fields, and still he was not dead. He was aware of earth in his eyes and nose, and of weight. He tried to move but felt himself pinned down, as though the earth had wrapped him in heavy, comfortable blankets and was urging him to sleep. The noise of the explosion seemed trapped in the narrow tube. He pictured his way back sealed off, and a flicker of panic rose in his belly, but died again beneath the heaviness of his pinioned state. The captive sound eventually diminished.

He listened for it to be replaced by the familiar sound of human agony, of men whose limbs had been removed from them or whose brains were going free from their skulls. He heard nothing at first. Then, as the last pieces of displaced earth settled in the tunnel, he heard a long thick sigh; it was a sound he had never heard before, but he knew that it was the noise of several men expiring simultaneously.

He envied them the peaceful exhalation, breath and spirit gone. He tried to move a leg, and found that he could. He flexed his shoulders and arms and felt a raw, sharp pain in the upper right arm. He tried to swallow, but could not gather enough saliva in his dry, earth-filled mouth.

After a few minutes it became clear to him that he was not seriously injured. His legs seemed unharmed. His right arm was damaged, but that would not matter, he thought, unless he needed to dig his way out and the efforts of one arm were not enough. He needed to move the debris from on top of him, then he could see if there was anyone else alive. He tipped his head back as far as he could, and saw that most of the roof of the tunnel was intact above him. It was the old good luck, the contemptible voodoo of survival.

With his left hand, he began to scrape and push at the earth on top of his legs. Eventually he reduced the weight sufficiently to be able to kick some of it away. He flexed and stretched his legs and found that apart from bruises they seemed to have escaped injury. He rolled his upper body, as though trying to throw off bedclothes, and managed to sit up. He stopped and breathed suddenly from the pain in his arm. He spat several times to clear his mouth. Gradually he gathered enough saliva to be able to swallow, and then to speak. He called out in the darkness. There was a lamp on its side: the glass was cracked but it was still alight. He heard nothing. He manoeuvred himself on to all fours and began to crawl forward with the lamp. He had been at the back of the group of men when the explosion had gone off; any survivors would therefore he in front of him. There were four miners, who were supposed to do the enlargement work on the listening chamber, and two other infantry. Stephen wondered how far spread the blast had been. Perhaps some of the others in the parallel tunnel had been further from the impact.

As he moved forward he came to a solid wall of detritus. Above it there were still small particles of earth dripping down like rain from where the roof had been blown away. It looked as though a further fall might occur at any moment. Stephen turned around and looked behind him. The way back appeared to be open. Although he would have to go on all fours for the first ten yards or so, he was reasonably certain he could fight his way back to the second lateral gallery where the men had dispersed. From there it would be simple enough, he presumed, to go back into the main gallery and thence to the foot of the shaft.

Something moved in the crush of earth ahead of him. He could see nothing. Then he heard a tiny scraping sound. He followed it with his hands and found that he was touching a piece of material. It was attached to an arm or leg of some kind. Movement was there.

With a growing heaviness of heart, Stephen saw that he would have to try to rescue its owner. He knelt down and began to pare at the weight of earth with the fingers of his left hand.

His right arm was of no use. Doggedly he worked away at the fall of soil, pulling it back with his hand until it had formed a pile, then kicking it away and spreading it out with his leg on to the floor behind him.

He examined his progress with the lamp. Eventually he made a hole around the piece of material, which was a sleeve. He stuck his hand in and squeezed the arm. He could feel it all the way to the shoulder. The sound of a human voice, in pain or greeting, came to him from behind the wall of earth.

Stephen shouted words of encouragement. He rested for a moment, then peeled off his tunic from his sopping shirt. As he freed his right arm he saw the black stain of blood on it.

He resumed his digging. He worried that the earth he took out was supporting other matter that would then fall into the space, closing it up even more heavily. After an hour he had made a space round the shoulders and head of the man. A piece of timber had collapsed diagonally above him, holding the main weight of the roof off his head, which lay in a protected space. He had been very lucky. Stephen was now close enough to speak to him.

"Hold on," he said. "Just keep still. I can get you out." He thought it unlikely that he could, because of the weight that had clearly fallen on the man's legs, which were shot out ahead of him toward the original face of the tunnel, but he kept digging and clearing and gasping through his efforts the automatic words of encouragement.

Jack Firebrace, entombed in his heavy burial place, felt his life come and go as the air thinned in the cavity about his head. The pain from his crushed legs swept up and down his spine and made him faint, then gasp back into consciousness, then drift away again. He tried to move them because he felt the agony would keep him from dying. If he could feel the pain then he would be conscious and therefore still alive.

In this state he recognized the voice of the man who had once pitched naked into his arms with a dry imprecation, himself on the verge of dying. He could feel the weak hand picking at the soil that trapped him, and he felt a sense that it was right, that he should be rescued by someone he had himself saved; he felt confident that Stephen would deliver him.

Jack's struggle was with himself. He narrowed his efforts to the battle against the soft, rolling waves of sleep that were his body's natural response to the pain in his legs. His head at least could move, and he thrashed it from side to side in an effort to stop it clouding over.

Stephen's soothing voice came in his ear. Jack felt a hand grip under his armpit and try to pull him.

"It won't work," he said. "My legs are trapped."

"Can you hear me?" said Stephen.

"Yes."

"Who are you?"

"Jack Firebrace. The one supposed to get you back safe." Jack was surprised that he was able to talk so well. The restored human contact had revived him.

"What happened?" said Stephen.

Jack grunted. "Camouflet probably. They were right above us. They've got our tunnel well marked down. They must have been waiting for weeks."

"Will there be more?"

"God knows."

"How badly are you trapped?"

"My legs have gone. I can't move them. My arms are all right. I can help you if you make enough space. I'm... "

"What's the matter? Are you all right?"

The effort of speech had made Jack faint. "Yes. Don't talk now. Dig."

"What if we bring down more?"

"Chance it," gasped Jack.

Stephen pulled off his shirt and resumed his toil. Jack felt him crawl in alongside in the space he had cleared. He told him to try to support the earth above them by using bits of timber that lay in the wreckage. For hours Stephen worked on one-handed under Jack's instructions. He was able to create a miniature selfcontained chamber within the fallen earth. Jack helped him push and heave the timbers into place above them; he used his hands to pull back more debris until his body was clear to the waist.

Eventually Stephen said, "I must rest. Even if it's only for a few minutes." He lay down in the nest they had made and fell asleep at once, his head resting on Jack's chest. Jack felt the rise and fall of his breathing. He envied him his sleep, but dared not join him for fear that he would not wake up.

He had said nothing to Stephen, in order not to raise his hopes too far, but he assumed a rescue party would have been dispatched from the trench. Even if they sensibly waited to be sure that there were no further enemy camouflets, they could not be long in arriving.

There was no time in the darkness, but Jack estimated they had been underground about six hours, for about five of which he had been trapped and Stephen had been working to free him.

He pictured Cartwright organizing the rescue party in the bright summer day above them. He made a vow that if he made it up to the surface he would never go underground again. He would pass the rest of his days in the air, with the feeling of sun or rain on his face. He found that he was drifting again: his mind began to follow itself in slow, dreamy circles.

He decided he would have to wake Stephen. If not, he was going to die. He took him by the shoulders and shook him, but Stephen fell back on to him. He slapped his face, and Stephen groaned, then fell asleep again. The weariness of four years seemed to have overtaken him.

Jack began cursing. He thought of the vilest things he could say and shouted them at Stephen. He slapped him again. Nothing would penetrate his fatigue. Then from behind them, back toward their own line, there came the sound of another explosion. Jack closed his eyes and crouched against the ground. He expected a core of soil and flame to come leaping down the tunnel, driven by the power of the blast.

Stephen was awake. "Christ. What was that?"

Jack could make out Stephen's anxious face in the light of the lamp.

"Another one. Back toward our line. They've got us marked out all right."

"What does it mean?"

"Nothing. We must try to get out."

What it really meant, Jack thought, was that it might now be impossible for a rescue party to reach them. It depended on precisely where the explosion had come.

It also meant that if Stephen had returned without trying to rescue him he could have been safely back above the ground some hours ago.

He said kindly, "You'd better try and pull me out. I'll be more use to you then than if I'm stuck here."

Stephen resumed his delicate work, trying under Jack's instructions to build a wooden tent over his legs. It reminded him of the construction they had put over the legs of the gassed boy opposite him in the hospital. He had to clear and build at the same time. Jack helped him force the earth out behind them.

As Stephen worked he thought about the second explosion and the damage it might have done. He felt the death he had wanted come closer to him. Still he could not embrace it.

Eventually the weight on Jack's legs was small enough for Stephen to pull him free. In the end he came out like a cork from a bottle, though with a bitter scream as the crushed flesh was dragged against the debris round it.

He lay trembling on the floor of the tunnel while Stephen tried to comfort him. If only they had brought some water. It had occurred to him as they left that a bottle would be useful, but he was only supposed to have been underground for an hour.

"How bad is it?" said Stephen when he gauged that Jack could speak.

"I think both legs are broken. And my ribs. There's an awful pain in here." He touched his chest.

"There's a bad cut on your head. Do you feel pain there?"

"Not really. But I feel weak. I feel dizzy, as though I've been hit."

"I'm going to have to carry you," said Stephen.

Jack said, "That's right. Like that time I caught you."

"I'll do my best for you, I promise. Do you think we'll get out?"

"It depends on where the earth fell."

"I think I should look for other survivors first."

Jack said, "You'd better understand. This'll be difficult. There'll be no one else. We can search if you want to, but I've seen what happens underground. Two of us surviving's a miracle."

Stephen put on his shirt and tunic and manoeuvred Jack on to his shoulders. He was not a big man, but the weight of him on Stephen's back as he went at a crouch down the tunnel made him have to stop every few yards. Jack was biting the fabric of Stephen's tunic to keep himself from screaming.

They got back to the junction with the second lateral gallery and sat down against the wall. Jack was trembling all over. A fever had started in him, and he had an urge to sleep. Stephen panted in lungfuls of the warm, thin air and tried to shift his position to give respite to the muscles of his back.

When they had rested a little, he said, "Which way did we come? I'm lost."

"It's quite simple. I'd better explain in case I... in case you lose me. Imagine a three-pronged fork." Jack put all his strength into making himself clear. "The middle prong leads to the listening chamber at the tip. We were halfway up it when the camouflet went off. The two prongs either side are the fighting tunnels. A lateral section joins the three prongs at their base. That's where we are now. This is where Lorimer sent us to our separate tunnels."

Stephen looked around at the anonymous tube beneath the ground with its bits of wood and earth.

"To get back," said Jack, "we go straight ahead, back down the shaft of the fork. Halfway back, that's where we first stopped to listen. It's very narrow, you remember. Then when the handle of the fork ends, where it would meet the hand, is the main lateral gallery. We cross that and it's only a short way to the shaft." He lay back against the wall, exhausted by his explanation.

Stephen said, "All right. I understand. What I'm going to do is leave you here while I go and look in the fighting tunnels for survivors."

"You don't need to go into that one," said Jack pointing to the left. "They all went into the right-hand one."

"Are you sure? I think I'd better check the other one."

Jack breathed in tightly between his teeth. "You must understand. I've got a fever now. If you leave me for long I won't survive."

Stephen saw the anguish in Jack's face. It was not the physical pain: he was weighing his own life against the chances of saving any of his friends'. "I don't want to be alone for long," he said.

Stephen swallowed. His instinct was to make it back to the foot of the shaft as fast as possible, but he imagined what the others in the tunnel must be thinking, if any of them were alive. They would be begging him to come to them. It was not fair to leave them without a chance. Something about Jack's blue face did not in any case make him hopeful.

He took Jack's arm. "I'll go very quickly up this one, the empty one. Then I'll come back and see how you are. Then I'll look quickly up the other one. I promise I won't be more than ten minutes in either." He searched his pockets to see if he had anything to give him that might make things easier. He found some cigarettes and a piece of chocolate.

Jack smiled. "No flames allowed. Gas. Thanks for offering." Stephen left him and took the lamp into the left of the two fighting tunnels. It was not as well supported as the main one. He could see where they had hacked it out with their picks. In a way it was more like a passageway, a thoroughfare that would emerge in light and understanding.

He made quick progress in the shambling crouch he had seen the miners use. He came to the end of it and saw the evidence of the explosion. It had not been so bad as in the central tunnel, but a good deal of earth had come down. He could not tell how much further the original face of the tunnel had been.

For a moment he stopped. There was no danger. It was quiet. He sighed and ran a hand back through his hair. He became aware of himself and his circumstances as the immediate imperative of action lifted. He would not go back until he was sure that he and Jack were the only survivors. If by searching he brought death closer, it would not matter; there would be some decorum in their dying deep beneath the country they had fought so long to protect.

He shouted out in the darkness. He went up to the blockage and pulled some loose earth away. He put his lips to the hole and shouted again. The debris was compacted so tight that the sound did not penetrate. Anything beyond it that had been living would long ago have been crushed to death.

He turned and made his way back to where Jack was lying. He knelt down beside him. Jack's eyes were closed, and for a moment Stephen thought he was dead. He felt for his pulse beneath the coarse cuff of his shirt. He had to dig between the tendons with his fingertips, but he found some small beat where life still ran.

He slapped him gently in the face to bring him round. Jack stirred and looked up.

He said, "Don't leave me again. Don't go." His voice was dry but Stephen could hear the weight of feeling in it.

"There'll be no one alive," said Jack. "That's where the main blast was, in that tunnel. We got it through the wall."

Stephen looked at him. He was in pain and he was frightened of dying, but there was no reason to disbelieve him. He knew about working underground.

"All right," said Stephen. "We'll try and get out. Are you strong enough? Do you want to rest some more?"

"Let's try now."

Stephen stretched himself, then bent down again. He levered Jack's upper body on to his shoulder, and supported him beneath the thighs with his left arm. He carried him as he would have done a sleeping child. Jack held the lamp over Stephen's shoulder.

After a few yards Stephen had to stop. His own damaged right arm could not support the weight and his left, naturally weak and further tired by digging, was dropping Jack's legs. He propped Jack against the side of the tunnel, then knelt in front of him and manoeuvred him on to his left shoulder. With both arms wrapped round him he could keep him on for bursts of ten yards at a crouch. Jack fainted each time Stephen stood him up, so after the first three attempts Stephen took his rest kneeling, with Jack still on his shoulder, and his own face pressed to the soil. He closed his eyes against the sweat that ran down from his forehead. He cursed his life and the shards of chalk that pierced his knees.

After an hour of the slow, dragging bursts they reached the end of the tunnel. There was nowhere to go; in front were only thousands of tons of France. Stephen swore at Jack. He meant the words to be beneath his breath, but they escaped. Jack stirred on his shoulder, and Stephen laid him down on the ground.

"You've brought me the wrong fucking way." He was exhausted. He lay panting with his face down.

Jack was stirred from his delirium by the impact of being set down. He shook his head and tried to concentrate.

"We went straight, didn't we?" He peered back behind them. There was still a lamp hanging from the roof that Evans had put there on their way through. It was a terrible sign. Jack looked ahead of them again. He said softly, "This is the right way. This is not the end, this is where the second explosion went off. We're about twenty yards short of the main gallery."

Stephen let out a groan and closed his eyes. Now death had him, he thought; now he would go with it.

They stayed where they were for an hour. Neither man had the energy to move. There was one way out and it was closed to them. Jack would shortly die of his wounds; Stephen would die of thirst and starvation.

By his side was his revolver. When hope was finally gone he would fire: up through the palate, into the coiled mess of consciousness and memory. There was a perverse appeal in the thought that he would complete what no enemy had managed.

When they had grown used to their despair, they began to talk again. Stephen asked Jack if his company would try to send more men down to rescue them.

"I don't think so," said Jack. "They'd find it difficult to shift this amount of spoil even if they did. They'd have to blow it out and that would risk bringing in the roof and making it worse. Also it's too close to our own line for comfort. They'll say a prayer at the service on Sunday and put us down as missing."

"You can't blame them. The war's almost over."

Jack said, "Are you afraid to die?"

"I think so." Stephen was surprised to hear himself say it. "I was lucky that I didn't feel fear above the ground, except at the obvious moments. Now I feel... alone."

Jack said, "But you're not alone. I'm here. I'm someone." He shifted his weight against the rubble. "What's your first name?"

"Stephen."

"Shall I call you that?"

"If you want."

There was a pause, then Jack said, "It's strange, isn't it? That I should be with you at the time I die. Of all the people I've known in my life that it should be you."

"Who would you choose to be with?" Stephen found himself interested, even though he was weighed down by the thought of his own death. "Which human being out of all those you have met would you choose to hold your hand, to hold close to you in the beginning of eternity?"

"To be with, like that, always, do you mean?"

"Yes. The other half of you."

"My son," said Jack.

"Your son. How old is he?"

"He died two years ago, of diphtheria. His name was John."

"I'm sorry."

"I miss him. I loved him so much." In the darkness of the tunnel Jack's voice came up unexpectedly in the lament he had denied himself at the time of John's death; so close to his own time of dying, he was freed from restraint. "I loved that boy. Every hair of him, every pore of his skin. I would have killed a man who so much as laid a hand on him. My world was in his face. I was not so young when he was born. I wondered what my life had been about until he came along. It was nothing. I treasured each word he gave me. I made myself remember each thing he did, the way he turned his head, his way of saying things. It was as though I knew it wouldn't be for long. He was from another world, he was a blessing too great for me."

Stephen said nothing, but allowed Jack to sob quietly into his hands. Jack did not seem resentful, even in his grief. His flat, guileless face with its narrow eyes looked wonderstruck, incredulous that such a love had been permitted him. When he was calmer, Stephen said, "You talk almost as though you had fallen in love."

"I think I did," said Jack. "I think it was almost like that. I was jealous of him. I wanted him to love me. I would watch the way the women played with him. I was pleased that he was happy, but I knew that really it was our games that were best. I knew it was the times with just the two of us that were the best, the purest things on earth."

Jack talked about the boy's innocence and how it had changed him. He could not find the words for it, and began to weep again.

Stephen put his arm round his shoulders. "It's all right," he said. "I'll get you out from under here. Somehow I will get you out and you'll have other children. John won't be the last."

"No. Margaret's too old now. She couldn't have another."

"Then I will have them for you."

When Jack had composed himself again, he said, "I don't suppose you'd choose to die with me beside you. I'm not much good to you."

"You'll do very well," said Stephen. "Who knows? Our own choices might not be so good as those that are made for us. I've met men I would trust in the mouth of hell. Byrne or Douglas. I would trust them to breathe for me, to pump my blood with their hearts."

"Did you love them best? Would they be the ones you'd choose?"

"To die with? No. The one time I've felt what you describe was with a woman."

"A lover, you mean?" said Jack. "Not your own flesh and blood?"

"I think she was my own flesh and blood. I truly believe she was." Stephen seemed to go into a trance. Jack said nothing. Then, as the minutes passed, he tried to rouse himself.

"We must find a way out of here," he said. "Back to the shaft's no good, so we should go forward."

"What's the point? There are just the tunnels there that end in blank walls."

"It would give us something to do, rather than just wait to die. We could try to make a noise. If you can manage to carry me again. Take off your breathing set. That's just getting in the way. And take mine off too. Leave them down there." Stephen knelt down and helped Jack on to his shoulders. He tried to conceal his despair. Clearly it was pointless for them to go back the way they had come; they had seen two of the three forward tunnels blocked. The third one, according to Jack, had taken the worst of the blast so was not likely to lead them miraculously into clean air and sunlight.

There seemed to Stephen something frivolous about their hope as they laboured back into the darkness. They were facing death and they could find nothing better to do. He felt they should have passed the time more constructively; they should have readied themselves in some way for the end instead of indulging in this boyish hope.

It seemed to please Jack, however. When they reached the crossroads at the second lateral gallery Stephen set him down and flopped to the ground beside him. His chest rose and fell as he squeezed the air into his lungs. Jack had closed his eyes to overcome the pain from his legs which, Stephen noticed, had developed a cloying smell of blood.

Jack smiled when he opened his eyes again. "Only one thing for it. Try the third prong of the fork. Where those other poor buggers went." Stephen nodded. "Give me a moment to get my breath back. I suppose we might as well. At least then we'll know... "

He trailed off, still not quite able to say the obvious thing.

Jack did it for him. "That it's the end."

The thought did not perturb Jack. He was beginning to welcome the idea of dying. While a primitive fear kept stirring in him, the pain of his body and the lost illusions of his life made him wish for the conclusion to come. He loved Margaret still, and would have chosen to see her, but she belonged to a different existence from the one he now inhabited with such unwanted intensity. She would die, in any event. The things on which he had based his faith had proved unstable. John's innocence, the message from a better world, had been taken from him. Any meeting he might have with Margaret and any rekindling of love he might feel would also prove illusory. Love had betrayed him, and he no longer wished to be reunited with his life. He felt tranquillity at moments when his pain left him. There was no consideration beyond the body in the darkness of the tunnel; what was done by them in the earth with their hands and legs and voices was the boundary of it all. In the muscular efforts of Stephen to save him, the way he patiently submitted himself to the weight and the pointless striving, Jack felt a sense of tightness and calm. They came to the beginning of the right-hand tunnel and Stephen had to go down on all fours to guide them through the ragged entrance. By the light of the fading lamp Jack looked up at the inadequately supported roof and was silently critical of the work of the men who had made it. It was not as high as a fighting tunnel ought to be. Soon Stephen was crouching. After a few more yards he needed to rest again.

It seemed to Jack that the sensible thing would be for Stephen to leave him while he pressed on in the hope of whatever miracle it was they were looking for; but Stephen did not suggest it. Stephen appeared to Jack to be filled with a kind of perverse determination; the harder their progress became, the more set he would be on carrying his ungainly burden.

The force of the explosion in the third tunnel had taken a different course. It appeared to have narrowed it by sucking it in from the sides. As Stephen went down on his knees to continue, he lifted Jack on to his back where he was able to hold the lamp. It swung to and fro, giving uneven flashes of light to their progress. Jack let out a scream as a cold hand brushed across his face. Stephen stopped and Jack twisted the lantern to look. An arm was sticking out from the wall of the tunnel. The body to which it was attached was buried behind it. They pushed onward. Jack saw a trousered leg sticking out from the earth. They stopped to inspect it.

"It's Evans," said Jack. "I recognize his sewing in the cloth here. He was my mate. We did shifts together."

"I'm sorry. We knew he'd gone, didn't we?"

"It doesn't matter," said Jack, "He's better off out of it. We've all gone now. Shaw, Tyson, Evans, Jones, and me. The whole of our little group." As they crawled on Jack lost his sangfroid. He began to tremble and to brush imaginary hands from his face. He felt the cold-reaching clasp of all his dead companions.

He was in a gallery of ghosts. The souls of all who had died, his friends and their companions; the spirits of the men they had killed, the German bodies that had been hurled upward in the exploding soil above the great mines they had laid: all the needless dead of the long war were grasping at his face with their cold hands. They reproached him for having killed them; they mocked him for being still alive.

He was trembling so much that Stephen had to put him down. He lay in the darkness sweating and shaking with fear, the pain of his leg momentarily forgotten.

"We are going to die now," he said. There was no more composure in his voice, only a wretched, childlike fear.

Stephen sat opposite him and rested his head in his hands. "Yes," he said. "I think this is the end."

Jack closed his eyes and rolled on to his side. He wished that the fever he had fought to hold at bay would now come and make him sleep.

Stephen said, "I don't mind dying. God knows, with all these men dead we couldn't ask for anything better. If I could have one wish before I went it would be for a small glass of water. The thought of streams and pools and gushing taps is all that's keeping me going, just the thought of them."

Jack began to moan softly. Stephen had heard the sound many times; it was the low, primitive cry he himself had made when he was carried in to the surgeon. Jack was calling to his mother.

Stephen felt Jack's shivering body and his soaking shirt. He had nothing dry with which to cover him: his own clothes were saturated with the sweat of carrying and digging. He tried to make Jack comfortable, then left him and crawled up the tunnel. He wanted to be on his own. He planned to find a place where he could lie down. There he would try to sleep and hope not to wake again.

He kept crawling forward till he came to a larger area, a space perhaps created by the blast. He rolled on his side and pulled up his knees to his chest. He prayed for oblivion and, despite the pain in his arm, he fell asleep. For many hours the two men lay separated by a few yards, each in his own unconsciousness.

When Stephen awoke, the damp smell and darkness made him think he was in his dugout. Then he stretched and encountered the walls of his narrow tomb. The lamp had gone out.

He cried softly to himself as his memory returned. He moved his injured arm, and as he searched for a grip with his left hand to lever himself up, he touched what felt like cloth.

He recoiled, thinking that, like Jack, he had discovered a corpse, some grim cadaver with whom he had been lying unaware for hours. But the material was coarser even than the weave of army clothes. He felt in his pocket for the electric torch he had been given at the tunnel head. In its weak beam he explored the material further with his fingers. It was a sandbag.

He sat up and pulled at it. He had to brace his legs against the side of the tunnel to shift the weight. Eventually he was able to work it back a few feet toward him. He saw that there was another one behind it. This part of the wall appeared to be built from sandbags. They were packed in too neatly and tightly to have been blown there by the blast, so presumably they had been placed there by the miners at some stage.

Sandbags, in his experience, had only one function, which was to absorb blast, whether from shells or bullets. Presumably they had felt this part of the tunnel to be particularly vulnerable. If so, then they must have known that there was a countermine nearby; and if that was the case, why had they continued to work there? He would have to ask Jack.

At the back of his mind was the shadow of a thought that there might be something behind the bags. Although it was probable that they were there for extra protection, it was just possible that they might lead into another tunnel. But if so, why had Jack not known about it?

Stephen crawled back to where he had left Jack. He found him curled up and shivering. He took him by the shoulder and tried to shake him awake. Jack shouted incoherently. It sounded to Stephen as though he was saying something about a shield.

Slowly Stephen was able to restore him to himself. He rocked him gently and called his name. He felt cruel bringing him back to the facts of his Jack looked up at him imploringly, as though asking him to disappear. Stephen knew that to Jack his face was a reminder that he was still alive.

"Listen," he said. "I found a sandbag up there. What do you think that means?"

"A full one?"

"Yes."

Jack shook his head weakly. He did not respond. Stephen took him by the wrists and squeezed them. He put his face close to Jack's, where he smelt the rotten air that he expelled from his lungs.

"Is it just to shore up the wall, or what? What do you people use them for? Come on. Answer me. Say something." The flat explosion of his hand against Jack's face made a magnified sound in the narrow space.

"I don't know... I don't know... It's just a bag. We used to fill them when we dug the tube. The Central Line. Inside the big shield. We stopped at Bank."

"For God's sake. Listen. Why sandbags in the wall? Here in France, in the war, not in the underground railway."

"We got to Liverpool Street in nineteen twelve. I was all in. Didn't work again."

Jack went on about his work in the London clay. Stephen let go of his wrists so that his arms fell on to his lifeless legs. The pain of the impact seemed to startle Jack.

He looked up again with wild eyes. "Behind the chamber. We packed them in behind the charge."

"But it's a fighting tunnel," said Stephen. "Anyway, they go sideways." Jack let out a snort. "Sideways? You're mad."

Stephen lifted Jack's hands again. "Listen, Jack. I may be mad. Maybe we both are. But we are going to die very soon. Before you go, just think very hard. Do that for me. I have carried you this far. Now do me this favour. Think what it might mean."

He held Jack's eyes in his from what light remained in the lantern. He could see Jack fighting to be free of him, desperate to shake off his last contact with the living world. Jack shook his head, or rather allowed it to loll from side to side. He closed his eyes and lay back against the tunnel wall.

There was drool and foam at the corners of his mouth. His blank, unemotional face seemed to withdraw further. Then a flicker caught the edge of his eye.

"Unless... no... unless it's Kiwis. Could be Kiwis."

"What are you talking about? Kiwis? What do you mean?"

"They lay the bags different, the New Zealanders. We stick them in a straight line behind the charge. They dig a little run at right angles to the main drive, then stick the charge in there. You don't need so many bags of spoil."

"I don't understand. You mean they'd lay a charge not in the main tunnel but off to one side?"

"That's it. Better compression, they say. Not so much work, if you ask me. Not so many bags."

Stephen tried to contain his excitement. "What you're saying is that there could be explosive in there, behind all the sandbags?"

Jack finally looked him in the eye. "It's possible. We don't come down so often these days and I know there was a Kiwi company here before us,"

"You mean they didn't tell you there was an explosives chamber?"

"They would have told the captain, but he wouldn't necessarily tell me. They never tell me anything. I've only been underground twice since we've been here."

"And then because we're not going to blow any more mines we've just been using it as a fighting tunnel to protect the main listening chamber?"

"We haven't blown a mine for months. We only do fatigues these days."

"All right. Just suppose there was explosive in a chamber behind those bags. Could we blow it?"

"We'd need wires or a fuse. And it depends how much there was. Probably bring down half the country."

"We've got nothing else to try, have we?"

Jack looked down again. "I just want to die in peace."

Stephen knelt down and lifted Jack to a crouching position, then heaved him on to his shoulder and began to stumble back into the darkness, the torch gripped between his teeth. A new energy made him unaware of the ache of his limbs or Jack's weight, or even the torturing thirst in his mouth.

When they got back to the enlarged area where he had found the sandbags, he laid Jack down again. He desperately wanted Jack to survive so that he could tell him how to blow the charge.

Each sandbag was three feet long and two feet across. They had been packed densely with what Jack called spoil, the debris of digging, in order to maximize their ability to contain the blast. With only one good hand to pull them, Stephen worked very slowly, each drag of about six inches being followed by a rest. He talked to Jack as he worked, hoping that his voice would stop him from slipping away. There was no response from the figure slumped on the ground. Although progress was measured in inches, he worked with a fury given him by hope. He had a picture in his mind of a great crater being blown into the field above them, and of him and Jack emerging from behind their shelter of sandbags to walk into the bottom of it, which, though thirty feet below ground level, would be open to the rain and the wind.

He was able to stand up in the enlarged area of tunnel and stretch his back from time to time. Each time he rested he bent over Jack and tried to rouse him with a mixture of force and cajoling. There was usually some response, though it was grudging and incoherent; he seemed to be delirious again.

Stephen went back to his work. He switched off the torch and laboured in the darkness. When he had cleared a dozen bags and stacked them in the main tunnel, it became easier to work because there was more space around him. He wanted to stop and make sure Jack was still all right, but feared that the more time he wasted by not clearing the bags, the closer they would come to the end of Jack's life. He pressed on. When his left hand was not strong enough he gripped the nozzle of a wedged bag between his teeth and worried it like a terrier. A piece of chalk broke one of his front teeth and drove into his gum, filling his mouth with blood. He was barely aware of the discomfort as he worked on and eventually came to the end of the pile of bags that had been so neatly and tightly stacked by the New Zealanders.

He went back into the tunnel and took the torch from the floor. Crawling back through the space he had cleared, he held the light ahead of him. There were several stacks of boxes marked "Danger. High Explosive. Ammonium Nitrate/Aluminium." They were piled against the forward wall of the small chamber, toward the enemy.

A small leap of excitement went through him. He stopped for a moment and found that his eyes were moist. He allowed himself to give in to the sensation of hope. He would be free.

He went carefully back and took Jack by the hand.

"Wake up," he said. "I'm through. I've found the explosive. We can get out. We can be free. You're going to live."

Jack's eyes, with their heavy lids, opened over his narrow, uninquisitive gaze.

"What's in there, then?"

"Boxes of ammonal."

"How many?"

"I didn't count. Maybe two hundred."

Jack let out a snort. He began to laugh, but seemed to lack the strength.

"That's ten thousand pounds. It takes one pound to blow up the Mansion House."

"Then we'll have to shift them out and just leave however much we want."

"One box would let them know we're here."

"Help me, Jack."

"I can't. I can't move my--"

"I know. Just encourage me. Tell me it can be done."

"All right. Do it. Perhaps you can. You're mad enough." When Stephen had rested for half an hour, he crawled back into the hole.

The wooden boxes had rope handles. At fifty pounds each, they were the ideal weight to be lifted and stacked by a fit man with both arms. With only his left to use, Stephen struggled badly. The ones he pulled from the top of the pile had to be jerked clear, then held aloft to stop them banging into the ground. After the first hour he had cleared six boxes and taken them back down to the fighting tunnel to a distance he imagined would make them safe from sympathetic detonation. He took out his watch and calculated. It would take him approximately thirty hours. As he became more tired and dehydrated his rests would become longer. He would need to sleep.

He looked at Jack's prostrate form on the tunnel floor and asked himself if the effort was really worthwhile. He expected Jack to die before he could finish. He could not be sure that he himself would last. At least he had found air in the explosive chamber. It was neither fresh nor plentiful, but a small trickle was penetrating from somewhere. It was possible that the explosion had smashed a ventilation pipe. There was a small pool of water on the floor in one corner which he sucked into his mouth, held, and spat back on to the chalky ground. It was too fetid to swallow, and in any case he would need it again.

In the middle of the boxes was a large wad of guncotton attached to a wire, which Stephen set to one side. When he had moved forty boxes he lay down next to Jack and slept. The time on his watch said ten past two, but he did not know if it was morning or afternoon or how long they had been underground.

He used the torch as little as possible. He worked with the instinct of an animal, brutal, stupid, blind. He did not think about what he did or why he did it. His life on the surface of the earth was closed to him. He would not have remembered Gray or Weir, could not have recalled the names of Jeanne or Isabelle. They had gone into his unconscious, and what he lived was like a bestial dream. Sometimes he stumbled on Jack as he passed, sometimes he kicked him hard enough to make him respond. Occasionally he dropped to his knees and sucked at the puddle on the floor.

As he neared the end of the task he feared that he might die before it was completed. He slowed down and rested more. He checked his own pulse. It took him three days to clear the chamber and when he finished he was too exhausted to think about setting off the single box that remained. He lay down and slept. When he awoke he at once went over to Jack and shone the torch in his face. His eyes were open and fixed ahead of him. Stephen shook him, certain that he was dead. Jack groaned in protest at being brought back to wakefulness. Stephen told him he had cleared the chamber. To encourage him, he crawled into it, scooped a handful of water from the puddle, brought it carefully back in his hands, and threw it in Jack's face.

"Tell me how to blow it, and you'll have as much water as you want." Jack's voice was almost inaudible. Stephen had to put his ear close to the dry_ _lips. Jack told him they used electric leads.

"Can I do it with a fuse?"

"If you can make one. Must be long. So we can get clear."

"Suppose I used the sandbags. Tore them into strips, then tied them together."

"If they're dry. But it won't work without a primer. Ammonal burns but it won't explode without guncotton to set it off."

Stephen went down to where he had stacked the bags; they were reasonably dry. He went back to where he had left his tunic and took out his knife and a box of matches. He cut the end from a bag and emptied it, then struck a match. The ragged edge flared up and the denser parts burned slowly. It could not be relied on.

"Suppose I break a box of ammonal and lay a small trail of powder along the top of it. Would that help?"

Jack smiled. "Be careful."

"How far away do we have to be?"

"A hundred yards. Behind a solid wall. And it lets off gas. You'll need to get the breathing sets."

Stephen calculated how long it would take him to cut and tie a hundred yards of sandbag. It was not possible. He could not use the dry gun-cotton because without it the ammonal would not detonate. He would have to lay a trail of explosive.

First he carried Jack back down the fighting tunnel to the lateral gallery. He put him a few yards up the left-hand fighting tunnel where he gauged he would be best protected. He collected the Proto breathing sets from the site of the second explosion and returned with them to Jack.

Then he carefully levered the top off a box of ammonal, first with the blade, then with the handle of his knife. He took the grey powder out in handfuls and placed it in a sandbag until the bag began to grow heavy. He carried it to the chamber and emptied a pile of it against the guncotton primer, which he placed inside the box that remained. Then he laid a trail about two inches wide back through the connecting run into the fighting tunnel. By this time the bag was empty and he went back to replenish it, then returned to where he had left off and continued, twice refilling the bag, before he came to where the rest of the ammonal was stacked. He ran the trail as far from it as possible. It was a chance he would have to take: he could not move it all again. He stopped the powder in the middle of the lateral gallery. He then emptied and cut up six sandbags for a fuse to get from himself to the start of the ammonal.

He sat down next to Jack. He fitted Jack's breathing set for him, then his own. Absurd hope made his heart pound.

"This is it," he said. "I'm going to blow it."

Jack made no response, so Stephen went into the gallery and knelt down by the end of the fuse he had made from the sandbags, which was about thirty feet long. He wanted to watch it burn through to the ammonal, then he would know they were going to be all right.

He paused for a moment and tried to find some thought or prayer appropriate to the end of his life, but his mind was too tired and his hand too eager. He scratched the head of the match against the box and watched it flare. No thought of caution or fear was in his mind. He touched the sandbag and saw it flame. His heart leapt with it; he wanted to live. It made him laugh, mad-eyed and bearded, like a hermit in his cave.

The material spluttered and glowed, then caught and faded, then burned again. It went to about six feet from the end, then seemed to stop. Stephen cursed loudly. He clasped the torch. For Christ's sake. A spark flew from the dead fuse like electricity leaping in a void. It touched the ammonal and Stephen saw a sheet of flame rising to the tunnel roof. He turned and ran three steps back toward Jack, but before he got there he was pitched forward by an explosion that tore out tunnels, walls, and earth and hurled the debris up into the air above the ground. The force of the blast rocked Lieutenant Levi on the firestep, where he was eating pea soup with sausage and bread dispensed from a company cooker that had traveled hundreds of miles since its first dispatch from Saxony.

A British bombardment had been focused on their front line for three days, presumably presaging a large attack. Levi had been vaguely wondering how soon it would be before he could resume his peacetime medical practice in Hamburg, where he had begun to gain some reputation as a doctor specializing in children's ailments. He had resisted joining the army for as long as possible, but the heavy loss of life inflicted on his country had made it inevitable. He left the children in the hospital and went home to say good-bye to his wife.

"I don't want to fight the French," he told her, "and I particularly don't want to fight the English. But this is my country and our home. I must do my duty." She gave him a Star of David, a small gold one that had belonged to several generations of her family, and put it on a chain around his neck. It was not just the Jewish quarter that was sorry to see Dr. Levi go: a small crowd gathered at the station to see him off.

Since the German spring offensive had been halted and the enemy, reinforced now by the Americans, had been moving numbers of tanks up into their front lines, Levi assumed that with the bombardment under way it would be only a matter of weeks before he and his wife were reunited. The small shame he felt at the prospect of German defeat was easily outweighed by his pleasure at the thought of peace.

"You're a doctor at home, aren't you, Levi?" said his company commander, coming down the trench as the shock of the ammonal explosion began to subside.

"A children's doctor, but I--"

"All the same. You'd better go and have a look. We've got a patrol down there. Take two men with you. Kroger and Lamm. They're your best bet. They know all the tunnels here."

"There are usually two explosions, aren't there? Hadn't we better wait?"

"Give it an hour. Then go down."

Kroger and Lamm came to report to him thirty minutes later. Kroger was a refined and clever man who had refused promotion on several occasions. He came from a good family, but had principles about social justice. Lamm was of simpler, Bavarian stock, a handsome dark-haired miner of imperturbable temperament. They took breathing apparatus, in case the explosion had released gas underground, as well as picks, ropes, and other pieces of equipment Lamm told them might be useful. Lamm himself also took a small quantity of explosive.

"How many of our men were down there?" said Levi.

"Three," said Lamm. "They'd just gone on a routine patrol to listen for enemy activity."

"I thought we'd destroyed their tunnel three or four days ago."

"We probably did. We're listening to see when they're going to attack. We don't expect them to be able to repair their own tunnel. We blew it in two places. They never heard us coming."

Kroger said, "Let's go, shall we? I'd rather be underground than sitting beneath this bombardment."

They heard shells screaming overhead and detonating in the support lines behind them. Levi followed the others down an incline that slowly took them thirty feet beneath the ground. Although he felt safer where the shells could not reach him, he was not enthusiastic about the idea of being shut in beneath the earth. They had been issued with enough food and water to last for three days, so someone at least presumed it might be a lengthy operation.

They walked along the main gallery for ten minutes. It had electric light in the ceiling though the circuit had been broken by the explosion. The system had been built with considerable care and precision. Lamm and Kroger sang as they walked along. The tunnels followed a similar pattern to those built by the British, though the main lateral gallery of the German network was attached to the sewers of the nearby town. The listening post that they had created close to the British line was protected by a single fighting tunnel that ran about ten feet above the British works; from this they had been able to dig down and lay the two charges that had made most of the enemy system impassable.

They had not gone far up their own central tunnel before they came to a substantial blockage. Levi sat down while Lamm and Kroger explored it with their picks. An appalling thought had occurred to him. His brother, an engineer attached to the same company, had told him he expected to go down and inspect the system at some time to make sure they had effectively closed the British tunnel. He did not normally go underground, but would periodically inspect new works. Levi had not seen him for three days, which was not in itself unusual as their duties were quite different, and while he did not know that he was one of the patrol who had gone down, he did not know for sure that he was not.

"It's a very heavy blockage," said Lamm. "Our best bet is to leave it for the time being and go and see what's happened in the fighting tunnel. We can come back if we have to."

Levi said, "Do you know which men were in the patrol?"

"No," said Lamm. "Do you?"

"No, I don't. I know there are three. I'm just wondering if one of them's my brother."

Kroger said, "I'm sure the CO would have told you."

"I doubt it," said Levi. "He's got other things on his mind. He's about to be organizing a full-scale retreat."

"We'll just have to hope," said Kroger. "For all we know they're all alive anyway, just carrying on with their job."

Lamm looked rather doubtful as he slid his pick into a loop on the side of his pack and led the way back to the beginning of the tunnel. They climbed through the narrow entrance into the fighting tunnel and made their way forward. It was narrower and darker, and they had to move at a crouch in places until they came to a section where the roof had been raised and timbered to the standard they expected from their diggers.

After fifty yards there was a great mess of exploded debris. The blast had blown the tunnel's sides out, hugely enlarging its circumference, though filling all the space with earth and chalk. The three Germans looked doubtfully at one another.

"It's blown right through into the main tunnel," said Lamm. "This is the same blast area."

"What I don't understand," said Levi, "is who set this thing off. What is it, anyway? I thought we'd knocked them out, and it can't be us, can it?"

"My guess," said Kroger, "is that it was an accident. There was a charge down here that wasn't used against their tunnel. It was left behind and it detonated. It's unstable stuff."

"The other possibility," said Lamm, "is that it's an enemy action."

"But how could they have got in again so quickly when we'd blown their whole system?" said Levi.

"Because they didn't get back in, they never left. We don't know how many men they had down there when we set off those charges. Some could have survived."

"But surely they'd have suffocated by now."

"Not necessarily," said Lamm. "They have ventilator pipes, air-feeds. They're probably smashed by now, but you get air pockets and odd vents up to the surface. One of ours survived eight days with just a bottle of water."

"God." Levi was appalled. "So behind this debris there could be not only three of our men dead or alive, but an unknown number of British, armed with explosives, living in holes or air pockets, like, like... "

"Like rats," said Lamm.

They began to hack at the obstruction with their picks. Two of them worked while the third rested or cleared the mess they had made. They were able to keep going for five hours before all three of them slumped to the ground. They drank as little water as they could bear and ate some biscuits and dried meat. Levi's younger brother was called Joseph. He had been the clever boy at school, always winning prizes for his Latin and mathematics. He had gone to be a scientist at university in Heidelberg. He emerged with a doctorate and was offered work by numerous firms as well as by the government. Levi found this garlanded figure with his bespectacled aloofness toward those who sought to load him with their favours hard to reconcile with the determined, asthmatic, but fundamentally comical figure he had known as a boy. Joseph had competed hard with his elder brother, but the difference in their ages had usually defeated him. Levi felt from the moment Joseph was born a great tenderness toward him, principally because he was the product of what he loved most in the world, his parents. He was anxious for Joseph to learn quickly what it was that made his parents so important and their way of doing things so admirable. His worst fear was that Joseph would in some way not understand the honour of the family, or would let it down. He thus felt no jealousy, only pleasure, when Joseph's prizes brought it the public renown he privately believed was its due.

Sometimes his younger brother exasperated him by what Levi saw as wilfulness. When they had so much in common, it seemed unnecessary for him not to follow his elder brother in everything but to make different decisions, cultivate different tastes, almost, it seemed to Levi, out of perversity. He thought that it was done to spite him, but did not allow it to destroy his fondness for the boy; he trained his irritation to be subservient to his continuing protectiveness.

It would be in some way characteristic of Joseph to have got himself into this narrow tunnel at the moment the blast had gone up. As Levi hacked at the wall with his pick he had a clear picture of Joseph's pale, strangely expressionless face, lying with eyes closed, crushed by the weight of the world on his asthmatic chest. In the pauses between work they could make out the noise of the bombardment overhead.

"The attack must be getting closer," said Kroger.

"We're never going to get through this," Lamm said. "You can hear by the sound it makes how heavy the fall is. I'm going to have to try to blow it."

"You'll bring the roof down," said Kroger. "Look."

"I'll use a very small charge and I'll pack it in tight so the blast goes the right way. Don't worry, I promise we'll come to no harm. What do you think?"

"All right," said Levi. "If that's the only way. But be careful. Use as small a charge as you can. We can always try again."

He did not want Joseph to be killed in a fall caused by his own men. It took Lamm two more hours to excavate the kind of hole he wanted. He wired the charge and paid out the line all the way back to the beginning of the incline that led up to the surface. He attached it to the detonator they had left there and, when Levi and Kroger were safe behind him, he sank the handle. In his narrow tomb, where a hole no larger than a knitting needle brought air but no light, the noise reverberated in Stephen's ears. A tremor of hope went through him. They had sent the rescue party. Weir's old company wouldn't let them down: they had been slow to start but now they were on their way. He shifted his weight a little, though there was hardly room for manoeuvre in the space that was left to them. Against his head to one side was a solid piece of chalk that divided them from whatever remained of the main tunnel. It was the only feature by which he could orientate himself; the rest of the earth that had been displaced by the explosion of ammonal had trapped them on all sides.

"Are you still there, Jack?" he said. He stuck out a leg and felt Jack's shoulder under his boot. There was a faint groan.

He tried to rouse him by talking. "Do you hate the Germans?" he said. "Do you hate everything about them and their country?"

Jack had not been properly conscious since the blast.

Stephen tried to provoke him. "They killed your friends. Don't you want to stay alive to see them defeated? Don't you want to see them driven back and humiliated? Don't you want to roll into their country sitting on one of our tanks? See their women looking up at you in awe?"

Jack made no response. As long as he was alive, Stephen felt there was some hope. If he was left alone, without the pretence of helping someone else, he would give way to the despair that ought, by any reasoned judgement of the facts, already to have overcome him.

He was not sure where the air was coming from, but toward the upper end of their space there was something breathable. He periodically changed places with Jack so that they could share it. He imagined some vent or pipe from the surface had been bent over by one of the explosions and was still delivering a tiny but vital current of air.

It was the darkness that worried him most. Since the explosion they had seen nothing. The torch had been blown from his hand and smashed. To begin with they were covered with earth, but slowly they had been able to remove it. The space in which they lay was about fifteen feet long and no wider than the span of their arms. When he first felt the size of it Stephen cried out in despair.

The obvious course of action was to lie still and wait to die. At some point in the exertion of digging he had lost his shirt, his tunic, and his belt with the pistol on it. He still had on trousers and boots but had no way of killing himself unless he took the knife from his pocket and applied it to an artery.

He flicked the blade open in the darkness and laid it against his neck. He enjoyed the familiar feel of the single, scrupulously sharpened blade. He found the pulse from his brain to his body, thudding silently beneath the skin. He was ready to do it, to end the panic of his entombment.

The little pulse beat against the fingertips of his right hand. It was oblivious to his circumstances. It beat as it had beaten when he was a boy in the fields or a young man at work; its unvarying blink saw no difference between the various scenes he had inhabited with such conviction and clarity. He was struck by its faithful indifference to everything but its own rhythm.

"Jack, can you hear me? I want to tell you about the Germans and how much I hate them. I'm going to tell you why you've got to live."

There was no response. "Jack, you have to want to live. You must believe." Stephen pulled Jack's body up closer to his. He knew the dragging would cause him pain.

"Why won't you live?" he said. "Why don't you try?" Shocked by pain back into half-consciousness, Jack spoke to him at last.

"What I've seen... I don't want to live any more. That day you attacked. We watched you. Me and Shaw. The padre, that man, can't remember his name. If you'd seen, you'd understand. Tore his cross off. My boy, gone. What a world we made for him. I'm glad he's dead. I'm _glad."_

"There's always hope, Jack. And it will go on. With us or without us, it will go on."

"Not for me. In a home, with no legs. I don't want their pity."

"You'd rather die in this hole?"

"Christ, yes. Their pity would be... hopeless."

Stephen found himself persuaded by Jack. What made him want to live was not a better argument, but some crude lust or instinct.

"When I die," said Jack, "I'll be with men who understand."

"But you've been loved at home. Your wife, your son, your parents before them. People would love you still."

"My father died when I was a baby. My mother brought me up. Surrounded by women I was. They're all gone now. Only Margaret, and I couldn't talk to her any more. Too much has happened."

"Wouldn't you like to see us win the war?" Even as he asked the question Stephen thought it sounded hollow.

"No one can win. Leave me alone now. Where's Tyson?"

"I'll tell you a story, Jack. I came to this country eight years ago. I went to a big house in a broad street in a town not far from here. I was a young man. I was rash and curious and selfish. I was alive to dangerous currents, things in later life you look at, then pass by--because they're too risky. At that age you have no fear. You think you can understand things, that it will all make sense to you in time. Do you understand what I mean? No one had ever loved me. That's the truth of it, though I wasn't aware of it then. I wasn't like you with your mother. No one cared where I was or whether I should live or die. That's why I made my own reasons for living, that's why I will escape from here, somehow, because no one else has ever cared. If I have to I will chew my way out like a rat."

Jack was delirious. "I won't have beer yet. Not yet. Where's Turner? Get me off this cross."

"I met a woman. She was the wife of the man who owned the big house. I fell in love with her and I believed she loved me too. I found something with her that I didn't know existed. Maybe I was just relieved, overwhelmed by the feeling that someone could love me. But I don't think it was only that. I had visions, I had dreams. No, that's not right. There were no visions, that was the strange thing about it. There was only the flesh, the physical thing. The visions came later."

"They got the compressor in now. Ask Shaw. Get me off."

"It isn't that I love her, though I do, I will always love her. It isn't that I miss her, or that I'm jealous of her German lover. There was something in what happened between us that made me able to hear other things in the world. It was as though I went through a door and beyond it there were sounds and signals from some further existence. They're impossible to understand, but since I've heard them I can't deny them. Even here."

It sounded to Stephen as though Jack were choking. He wasn't sure if he was trying to stifle laughter or whether he was sobbing.

"Lift me up," said Jack when he could breathe properly.

Stephen lifted him up in his arms and held him across his lap. His inert legs dangled to one side, and his head fell back on his shoulders.

"I could have loved you." Jack's voice had become clear. He made the choking sound again, and with his head now so close to his own, Stephen could hear that he was laughing, a thin, mocking sound in the cramped darkness.

As it became fainter, Stephen began to knock rhythmically with the end of his knife against the wall of chalk by his head to give the rescue party guidance. Lamm's controlled explosion had made a hole in the fallen debris large enough for the three of them to go through.

Levi followed the other two with a mixture of eagerness and apprehension. They found the line of the main German tunnel but could see from the shattered timbering that there was further damage.

Kroger stopped the other two and pointed ahead. The base of the tunnel seemed to disappear into a hole. When they were as close to it as they dared to go, Lamm took a rope from his pack and secured one end around one of the timbers that was still upright.

"I'll go down and have a look," he said. "You two keep hold of the end of the rope in case the timber snaps."

They watched him tread carefully into the abyss. Lamm called up to them every two or three steps he took. Eventually he found another level where he could stand. He tied the rope firmly round him and shouted up to the top for them to keep a tight hold. He held his lamp up and peered about him. A metal gleam came back from the murk. He bent down to look. It was a helmet. On all fours, he searched the earth with his hands. He touched something that was solid and bore no resemblance to chalk. It left a sticky feeling on his hand. It was a shoulder, wrapped in feldgrau, the grey of the German uniform. The rest of the body was attached to it, though from the waist down it was buried under debris. The head was also more or less whole, and Lamm could see from the features that this was the body of Levi's brother.

He inhaled and blew out again through puffed cheeks. He did not want to shout the news up to the others, but it seemed unfair to Levi to withhold it from him. He lifted his lantern and looked round the chamber again. He could see no further evidence of bodies or activity. He felt the hands of the dead man to see if he had a ring; he took the identity tag from his neck but wanted something less bleak by which his brother could identify him. The fingers were bare, though he found a watch, which he put in his pocket.

He tugged twice at the rope and shouted that he was coming up. He felt the line go taut as Kroger and Levi added their counterweight to his ascent. It was a drop of about twenty feet and it took them several minutes to bring him up as his boots scrabbled against the loose sides in an effort to find a proper grip.

"Well?" said Levi, when they had all regained their breath. Something about Lamm's handsome face troubled him; it was unwilling to meet his gaze.

"I found a body. One of our men. He must have been killed instantly."

"Have you got his disc?" said Kroger. Levi had gone very still.

"I have this." Lamm held out the watch to Levi, who took it reluctantly. He looked down. It was Joseph's. It was a present that had been given to him on some family occasion by their father: his bar mitzvah, he thought, or as a reward for winning his place at university.

Levi nodded. "Silly boy," he said. "So near the end." He walked a little way up the tunnel, away from the others, so he could be alone.

Lamm and Kroger sat on the tunnel floor and ate some more of the food they had brought.

An hour later Levi returned from his prayers. His religion would not permit him to take the food Lamm offered him.

He shook his head. "I have to fast," he said. "Meanwhile, we should continue our search."

Kroger cleared his throat. He spoke gently. "I wonder if this is wise. Lamm and I have been talking. We've seen the size of the blast and Lamm tells me there is almost no chance that anyone further into the tunnel than your brother could have survived it. We've discharged our duty as a search party. We've established what happened and we can take your brother back to the surface and give him a proper burial. If we continue underground I think we would jeopardize our own lives for no real purpose. We don't know what may have happened above us. Honour has been satisfied here. I think we should go back."

Levi rubbed his hand along his jawline where the beard was starting to grow. A period of mourning would mean that it would cover his face by the time he was next allowed to shave.

He said, "I sympathize with you, but I don't agree. Two of our fellowcountrymen are somewhere here beneath the earth. If they are dead we must find them so we can give them a proper burial. If they are alive, we must rescue them."

"The chances are--"

"It doesn't matter what the chances are. We must complete the task." Kroger shrugged.

Lamm saw the practical problems of delay. "It's hot down here," he said. "His body--"

"The flesh is weak. What remains of him is something that won't rot. I will carry him myself when the time comes."

Lamm looked down.

"Don't be afraid," said Levi. "The men down here are from our own country. They don't want to be left beneath this foreign field. They must go back to the places they loved and died for. Don't you love your country?"

"Of course," said Lamm. He had taken his orders. He saw no further need for discussion. He stood up and began to gather up the rope to carry on.

"I love the fatherland," said Levi. "At a time like this, a death in my family, it binds me more than ever to it." He looked challengingly at Kroger, who nodded unhappily, as though he thought Levi's fervour came from some temporary storm. Levi took his shoulder. "All right, Kroger?" He looked into Kroger's clever, doubtful face. He saw no real agreement, but at least there was acquiescence. Kroger went to help Lamm prepare to go down again.

Levi went with him, leaving Kroger at the top to rest. Twenty feet below the floor of their main tunnel they began to hack with their picks at the debris from the blast. They did not know what they were searching for, but by clearing the earth that had been most recently displaced they hoped to see more clearly what had happened.

They took off their shirts as they warmed to the work. Their picks made hard reverberations where they struck the solid chalk.

Stephen took the glass from his watch so that he could feel the time in the darkness. It was ten to four when he heard the sounds of digging once more, though whether it was morning or afternoon he did not know. He estimated that he and Jack had been underground five or possibly six days.

He pulled Jack once more up to the tiny draught of air so he could take his turn. He lay with his fingers on his watch, timing the half hour he would spend in the stifling end of the coffin. He made no movement in case it should increase his need for oxygen.

The fear of being enclosed still ran through him. He reasoned with himself that since the worst had happened, and he was now buried alive with no room to turn round, then he should no longer be afraid. Fear was in expectation, not in the reality. Yet still the panic was with him. Sometimes he had to hold his body rigid to prevent himself from screaming. He wanted desperately to strike a match. Even if it only showed the limits of his prison it would be something.

Then would come minutes of diminished life. His imagination and his senses seemed to close down, like lights being turned off one by one in a big house. Eventually only a dim blur persisted as some trace of will kept burning. Through the hours he lay there he did not cease to protest in his mind against what was happening to him. He fought it with a bitter resentment. Although the strength of it came and went as his body flagged with thirst and fatigue, the bitterness of his anger meant that some light, however faint, stayed alive. When his half hour was up he crawled back and lay down alongside Jack.

"Are you still with me, Jack?"

There was a groan, then Jack's voice came up through layers of consciousness and found a lucidity it had not had for days.

"Been glad of these socks to rest my head on. I've had a new pair from home each week of the war."

Stephen felt the knitted wool beneath Jack's cheek as he lifted him up.

"I've never had a parcel," he said.

Jack began to laugh again. "You're a joker, no mistake. Not one parcel in three years? We got two a week at least. Everyone did. And as for letters--"

"Quiet. Can you hear that? It's the rescue party. Can you hear them digging? Listen."

Stephen manoeuvred Jack so that his ear was close to the chalk.

"They're coming," said Stephen. He could tell from the sound of the echo how far away they were, but he made out to Jack that they were almost on them.

"Any minute, I should think. We'll be out of here."

"You've worn army socks all the way through? You poor bugger. Not even the poorest private in the section had--"

"Listen. You're going to be free. We're getting out."

Jack was still laughing. "I don't want that. Don't want that... " His laughter turned into a cough, and then into a spasm that lifted up his chest in Stephen's arms. The hacking, rattling sound filled the narrow space, then stopped. Jack let out a long final exhalation as all the breath left him and his body fell back in the end he had wanted.

For a moment Stephen held the body in his arms, out of respect for him, then moved it back to the airless end of the hole. He put his mouth close to where the draft of air had been and breathed in deeply.

He stretched out his legs and pushed the body a little further from him. He felt bitterly alone.

There was only the sound of digging, which, he could now no longer deny to himself, was hopelessly distant, and the weight of the earth to keep him company. He found matches in his pocket. There was no one to forbid him his craving for light. Somehow he desisted.

He cursed Jack for dying, for not believing in the possibility of rescue. Then his anger faded and his mind narrowed its efforts to the distant rhythmic sound of pick on chalk. While the sound was there it was like the beat of his own pulse. He took his knife from his pocket again and began to knock the end as strongly as he could against the wall by his head.

After four hours of digging Levi and Lamm had made little impact. Levi called up to Kroger that he should come down and replace Lamm.

While he was waiting for Kroger to arrive, Levi sat down and rested. It had become a matter of honour for him to find his brother's companions. Joseph would not have wanted him to be the kind of man who allowed personal grief to deflect him. It was not so much his own honour as Joseph's that was at stake. His actions could restore some dignity to the broken body.

Above the rasp of his breathing, very faintly, he heard a tapping sound. He pressed his head against the wall and listened. It could have been a rat, he thought at first, but it was too rhythmic and too far underground. There was something about the quality of the sound that made it clear it was coming from a considerable distance: only a human being could have had the strength to make the noise carry. Kroger jumped off the end of the rope and Levi called him over. Kroger listened.

He nodded. "There's definitely someone there. Slightly up from here, I think, but roughly parallel. It doesn't sound strong enough to be a pick or a spade. I think it's someone trapped."

Levi smiled. "I told you we should carry on."

Kroger looked doubtful. "The question is, how are we going to get through? There's a lot of chalk between us."

"We'll start by blowing it. Just a controlled explosion. I'll go up and send Lamm down in my place. He can lay a charge."

Levi's face was set in determined enthusiasm. Kroger said, "Suppose this noise is being made not by our men but by one of the enemy who's still trapped?" Levi's eyes widened. "I don't believe anyone could be alive after all this time. And supposing it was, then... " He spread his hands wide and shrugged.

"Then what?" said Kroger briefly.

"Then it would be the man who killed my brother and his two companions." Kroger looked at him unhappily. "An eye for an eye... You're not thinking about revenge are you?"

Levi's smile faded. "I'm not thinking of any specific action. My faith provides me with guidance for anything. I am not afraid to meet him, though, if that's what you mean. I should know what to do."

"We should take him prisoner," said Kroger.

"That's enough," said Levi. He went to the foot of the rope and called out to Lamm to bring him up.

Lamm, who had been on the point of falling asleep, said nothing as Levi told him what he wanted him to do. He prepared a charge and slipped it into his pack, then went down the rope.

The mixture of chalk and soil proved difficult for him and Kroger to excavate. It took five hours before they had made a hole for the charge that satisfied Lamm. Levi changed places with him to help Kroger. They filled sandbags and packed them in tightly behind the explosive.

Kroger stopped to drink some water and eat more of the meat and biscuit he had brought. Levi declined his offer.

He was beginning to feel lightheaded with grief and fatigue, but he was determined to maintain his fast. He worked on furiously, ignoring the sweat that stung his eyes and the trembling of his fingers as he filled the sandbags. He did not know what or whom he expected to find behind the wall; he felt only the compulsion to carry on. His curiosity was linked to his sense of loss. The death of Joseph could only be explained and redeemed if he could find the man still living and confront him.

They laid the wires and retreated to their safe place at the foot of the long incline back towards the surface. They could hear the sound of heavy shelling, varied by mortar and machine-gun fire from the air above. The attack had begun. Lamm sank the detonator and the ground shook beneath their feet. There was a hot, breathy roar that ebbed, then flowed again. For a moment it sounded as though fireballs of earth and chalk were coming for them through the tunnel. Then the sound ebbed a second time and died into quietness.

They went back quickly through the low, timbered entrance, crawled, shuffled, and ran back to the top of the dip into the earth below. A cloud of chalk made them cough and retreat for a minute until it had subsided.

Levi told Kroger to stay behind while Lamm went down with him. He wanted Lamm's assessment of the blast, and he doubted Kroger's whole-heartedness. They went through the hole made by the explosion, digging and enlarging as they went. It had taken them right into the main British listening post. They examined the foreign timbering with quizzical interest.

"Listen." Levi laid his hand on Lamm's forearm.

The sound of tapping was frantic and much closer than before.

Levi was so excited that he leapt into the air, banging his head against the roof of the chamber. "We're there," he said. "We've made it." They had blown away what separated them. Now they had only to dig through and reach with their hands.

In his narrow space Stephen was rocked by the new explosion. He rolled on to his front and covered his head with his arms against the imagined fall of the world. But although the noise rebounded from the walls, they stayed secure.

He began to kick and buck within the confines of where he lay. The claustrophobia he had kept at bay now gripped him. The thought of men moving freely close at hand and the fear that they might not hear or reach him let loose his panic.

In his thrashing he dislodged earth that had been shaken by the blast. A heavy fall on his legs made him stop for a moment and hold himself tight in selfcontrol. He resumed his knocking with the butt of his knife and began to shout as loudly as he could. "I'm here. Over here."

He pictured the men of Weir's company, their cheerful faces grinning beneath their helmets as they hacked their way toward him. Who would they be? Which ones had been sent for him? He could remember no names or faces. There had been Jack, but he was dead alongside him. A vacant-looking man with fair hair, Tyson, but he had died long ago. And these small ones who never seemed to be standing upright, even in the open air, though perhaps they too had been underground with him when the first blast went off.

Stephen felt his mind become extraordinarily clear. It was filled with pictures of the normal world, the world inhabited by women, where people moved in peace and made love and drank, and there were children and commerce and laughter. He thought of Jeanne and of the astonishing smile that rose like a sunburst to her eyes. The hideous, cramped world of earth and sweat and death was not the only reality; it was a confining illusion, a thin prison from which he would burst forth at any moment.

His thirst and his fatigue were forgotten; he was alive with a passion for the world, for the stars and trees, and the people who moved and lived in it. If they could not reach him, he would throw off the walls of the earth, he would scratch, eat, and swallow his way out of them and up into the light.

"Keep going." Levi laughed, a flame in his eyes. His skin was shining with sweat as he worked his pick into the wall, where they had peeled back the timbers. Lamm screwed up his face under matted hair and squinted at him from the light of the lantern.

"Go on," shouted Levi, "go on."

He was close to delirium as he heaved his pick once more into the earth. In his mind he saw only the features of his dear brother Joseph. How much he had loved him and lived through him; how much he had wanted Joseph to be like himself, but better, to profit from his experience and make something that would honour the noble nature of his parents and their family before them. Lamm worked on in an urgent rhythm, the slabs of muscle on his shoulders sliding back and forth beneath the drenched grey vest as the pick demolished the intervening earth.

Working ten yards along from Levi, he struck air. He was through. He shouted out. Levi pushed him aside and began to dig frantically with his hands, throwing out the earth behind him like a dog. He called out to the trapped man. They were coming, they were with him.

It was Levi's work, not Lamm's, that had loosened the earth sufficiently at the end of Stephen's coffin for him to be able to crawl out of it, over the fallen body of Jack Firebrace.

On hands and knees he moved back among the debris his own explosion had made. About a yard further along he could see where the tunnel was still intact. It was here that Lamm had broken through. Levi pushed Lamm back and climbed into the British tunnel himself. Tricked by the echo of Stephen's tapping, he turned the wrong way, and began to walk away from him.

Gurgling and spitting earth, Stephen clawed his way forward, shouting as he went. He could see light from some lantern swaying in the tunnel ahead of him. There was air. He could breathe.

Levi heard him. He turned and walked back.

As the tunnel roof lifted, Stephen moved up into a crouch and called out again. The lantern was on him.

He looked up and saw the legs of his rescuer. They were clothed in the German feldgrau, the colour of his darkest dream.

He staggered to his feet and his hand went to pull out his revolver, but there was nothing there, only the torn, drenched rags of his trousers.

He looked into the face of the man who stood in front of him and his fists went up from his sides like those of a farm boy about to fight.

At some deep level, far below anything his exhausted mind could reach, the conflicts of his soul dragged through him like waves grating on the packed shingle of a beach. The sound of his life calling to him on a distant road; the faces of the men who had been slaughtered, the closed eyes of Michael Weir in his coffin; his scalding hatred of the enemy, of Max and all the men who had brought him to this moment; the flesh and love of Isabelle, and the eyes of her sister. Far beyond thought, the resolution came to him and he found his arms, still raised, begin to spread and open.

Levi looked at this wild-eyed figure, half-demented, his brother's killer. For no reason he could tell, he found that he had opened his own arms in turn, and the two men fell upon each other's shoulders, weeping at the bitter strangeness of their human lives.

*

They helped Stephen to the bottom of the rope and gave him water. They lifted him up, and Levi walked with his arm round him to the end of the tunnel while Lamm and Kroger went back into the darkness to bring out the body of Jack Firebrace. Levi guided Stephen's slow steps up the incline toward the light. They had to cover their eyes against the powerful rays of the sun. Eventually they came up into the air of the German trench. Levi helped Stephen over the step.

Stephen breathed deeply again and again. He looked at the blue and distant sky, feathered with irregular clouds. He sat down on the firestep and held his head in his hands.

They could hear the sound of birds. The trench was empty.

Levi climbed on to the parapet and raised a pair of binoculars. The British trench was deserted. He looked behind the German lines, but could see nothing in front of the horizon, five miles distant. The dam had broken, the German army had been swept away.

He came down into the trench and sat next to Stephen. Neither man spoke. Each listened to the heavenly quietness.

Stephen eventually turned his face up to Levi. "Is it over?" he said in English.

"Yes," said Levi, also in English. "It is finished." Stephen looked down to the floor of the German trench. He could not grasp what had happened. Four years that had lasted so long it seemed that time had stopped. All the men he had seen killed, their bodies, their wounds. Michael Weir. His pale face emerging from his burrow underground. Byrne like a headless crow. The tens of thousands who had gone down with him that summer morning. He did not know what to do. He did not know how to reclaim his life. He felt his lower lip begin to tremble and the hot tears filling his eyes. He laid his head against Levi's chest and sobbed. They brought up Jack's body and, when the men had rested, they dug a grave for him and Joseph Levi. They made it a joint grave, because the war was over. Stephen said a prayer for Jack, and Levi for his brother. They picked flowers and threw them on the grave. All four of them were weeping.

Then Lamm went looking in the dugouts and came back with water and tins of food. They ate in the open air. Then they went back into the dugout and slept. The next day Stephen said he would have to rejoin his battalion. He shook hands with Kroger and Lamm, and then with Levi. Of all the flesh he had seen and touched, it was this doctor's hand that had signalled his deliverance. Levi would not let him go. He made him promise to write when he was back in England. He took the buckle from his belt and gave it to him as a souvenir. _Gott mit uns. _Stephen gave him the knife with the single blade. They embraced again and clung to each other.

Then Stephen climbed the ladder, over the top, into no-man's-land. No hurricane of bullets met him, no tearing metal kiss.

He felt the dry, turned earth beneath his boots as he picked his way back toward the British lines. A lark was singing in the unharmed air above him. His body and his mind were tired beyond speech and beyond repair, but nothing could check the low exultation of his soul.

ENGLAND 1979--PART SEVEN

Elizabeth was worried about what her mother would say when she told her she was pregnant. Françoise had always been strict about such things, to the extent that Elizabeth had not told her that her boyfriend was married. "He works abroad," she had been able to say, when Françoise had wanted to know why they had never been introduced.

She postponed the moment when she would have to tell her, but by March she was beginning to put on weight. Rather than work it into the conversation during one of her teatime visits to Twickenham, she decided to invite her mother up to dinner in London and make a celebration of the announcement. Part of the reason, she admitted to herself, was to wrong-foot Françoise, to put her on the defensive; but she hoped that her mother would share in her own happiness at the prospect. The date was fixed and the restaurant was booked.

Telling Erich and Irene was also awkward because her pregnancy meant she would be away from work for a time. Erich took the news as a personal slight against him and his son, who, he irrationally believed, ought to have been the father of Elizabeth's children, even though he was contentedly married to someone else. Irene was also displeased. Elizabeth could not understand. Irene was one of her best friends: she took her side in everything. Yet with this most important news, she seemed unable to share Elizabeth's joy and excitement. She muttered a good deal about marriage and the family. A few weeks after Elizabeth had first told her, Irene came into her room at work to apologize.

"I don't know why, but I was a bit put out when you told me about the baby. I expect it's just the old green-eyed monster. I'm very pleased for you, dear. I've already made these for it." She gave Elizabeth a paper bag in which was a pair of knitted woollen socks.

Elizabeth hugged her. "Thank you. I'm sorry I was so tactless. I really should have thought. Thank you, Irene."

When people asked her who the father of the child was, Elizabeth refused to tell them. To begin with they were affronted. "It's bound to leak out, you know," said the ones who had not heard about Robert. "You can't expect the child not to have a father." Elizabeth shrugged and said she would manage. Those who did know about Robert presumed he was responsible. Elizabeth said, "I'm not telling you. It's a secret." Their irritation eventually died down, and with it their curiosity. They had their own business to attend to, and if Elizabeth was going to be silly about it, that was up to her. So, as she had thought, it was possible to keep a secret: people's nosiness was finally exceeded by their indifference; or, to put it more generously, you were allowed to make your own life.

Elizabeth was due to meet her mother on a Saturday evening. In the morning she finished reading the last of her grandfather's notebooks, translated by Bob's arachnoid hand. They went into considerable detail. There was a long account of his burial underground with Jack Firebrace and the conversations they had had. Elizabeth was particularly struck by a passage, somewhat unclear in Bob's rendering, in which they appeared to have talked about children, and whether either of them would have them after the war. "I said I would have his," was how the exchange appeared to end. Much clearer was the paragraph in which Stephen recalled Jack's love for a son called John.

Having read all the notebooks as well as two or three more books about the war, Elizabeth finally had some picture in her mind of what it had been like. Jeanne, or Grand-mère as Elizabeth knew her, made several appearances toward the end, though the narrative gave away nothing of what Stephen might have felt for her.

"Kind" was the tepid word most often applied to her in Bob's translation; "gentle" made the occasional appearance. It was not the language of passion. Elizabeth did some calculations on a piece of paper. Grand-mère born 1878. Mum born... she was not sure exactly how old her mother was. Between sixty-five and seventy. Me born 1940. Something did not quite add up in her calculations, though it was possibly her own arithmetic that was to blame. It didn't really matter. She dressed and made up carefully for the evening. She tidied her flat and poured herself a drink as she waited for her mother. She stood in front of the fire and straightened the things on the mantelpiece: a pair of candlesticks, an invitation, a postcard, and the belt buckle, which she had cleaned and polished so it shone with the glittering fervour it must have had when first cast: _Gott mit uns._

When Françoise arrived she opened a half-bottle of champagne.

"What are we celebrating?" said Françoise, smiling as she raised her glass.

"Everything. Spring. You. Me." She found the news harder to break than she had expected.

The restaurant she had chosen was one that been recommended by a friend of Robert's. It was a small, dark place in Brompton Road that specialized in northern French cooking. It had benches covered in scarlet plush, and brown smoky walls with oil paintings of Norman fishing ports. Elizabeth was disappointed when they first arrived. She had expected something brighter with a noisy clientele more appropriate to an evening of good news.

They studied the menu as the waiter tapped his pen against his notepad. Françoise ordered artichoke and sole Dieppoise, Elizabeth asked for mushrooms to begin with, then fillet of beef. She ordered expensive wine, Gevrey Chambertin, not sure if it was red or white. They both drank gin and tonic while they waited. Elizabeth ached for a cigarette.

"Have you completely given up?" said Françoise, seeing her daughter's nervous hands.

"Completely. Not one," Elizabeth smiled.

"And have you put on weight as a result?"

"I... well, a bit I think."

The waiter arrived with the first courses. "For you, Madame? The artichoke? And for you the mushrooms? Which of you ladies would like to taste the wine?" When he finally left them and they had started to eat, Elizabeth said awkwardly, "I have put on a little weight, I think, but it's not because of giving up smoking. It's because I'm expecting a baby." She braced herself for the response. Françoise took her hand. "Well done. I'm delighted."

Elizabeth, with tears in her eyes, said, "I thought you'd be annoyed. You know--because I'm not married."

"I'm just pleased for you, if it's what you want."

"Oh yes. Oh yes. It's what I want all right." Elizabeth smiled. "You don't seem very surprised."

"I suppose I'm not. I noticed that you'd got a little heavier. And that you'd stopped smoking. You told me it was a New Year's resolution, but you'd never managed to keep it before."

Elizabeth laughed. "All right. Now aren't you going to ask who the father is?"

"Should I? Does it matter?"

"I don't think it does. He's happy about it--well, happy enough. He's going to help support it financially, though I didn't ask him to. I think it'll be all right. He's a very nice man."

"That's fine then. I won't ask any more."

Elizabeth was surprised by how calmly Françoise had taken the news, even if she had guessed and therefore had time to prepare herself. "You don't mind that your grandchild will be born to a woman who isn't married?"

"How could I mind?" said Françoise. "My own mother wasn't married to my father."

"Grand-mère?" Elizabeth was amazed.

"No. Grand-mère is not my real mother." Françoise looked tenderly at Elizabeth. "I've often meant to tell you, but somehow there seemed no need. It's so unimportant really. Your grandfather married Grand-mère, Jeanne, in 1919, after the war. But I was already seven years old then. I was five by the time they first met!"

"I _thought _it didn't add up! I was doing some sums after I'd been reading his notebooks. I put it down to my bad maths."

"Are there references to someone called Isabelle in these books?"

"A couple, yes. An old girlfriend, I assumed."

"She was my mother. She was Jeanne's younger sister."

Elizabeth looked wide-eyed at Françoise. "So Grand-mère was not really my grandmother?"

"Not in the flesh, no. But she was to all intents and purposes. She brought me up and she loved me like her own child. Your grandfather went to stay with a family before the war. He had an affair with Isabelle and they ran away together. When she discovered she was pregnant, she left him and eventually went back to her husband. Years later, during the war, your grandfather met Grand-mère in Amiens. She took him to see Isabelle again, but Isabelle made Grand-mère promise she would not tell him about the baby."

"And the baby was you?"

"That's right. It was a silly subterfuge. I don't know. She just wanted to spare his feelings. He didn't find out until he was about to marry Jeanne. I was sent to Jeanne from Germany, where I had been living, because my real mother had died. She died of flu."

"Of flu? That's impossible."

Françoise shook her head. "No. There was an epidemic. It killed millions of people in Europe just after the end of the war. Isabelle had always said that if anything should happen to her, Grand-mère was to bring me up. That was agreed between them when she first went to Germany with the man she had fallen in love with. He was a German called Max."

"But didn't he want to keep you with him?"

"I don't think so. He was very sick from the war. He died himself not long afterwards. And I wasn't his child, after all."

"And so you were brought up as though you were Stephen and Jeanne's child?"

"Exactly. Grand-mère was wonderful. It was like having a second mother. We were a very happy family."

The waiter brought more food.

"Do you mind?" said Françoise after a minute. "Does it matter to you? I hope not, because it doesn't matter to me. Where there is real love between people, as there was between all of us, then the details don't matter. Love is more important than the flesh-and-blood facts of who gave birth to whom."

Elizabeth thought for a moment. "I'm sure you're right," she said. "It'll take me a bit of time to digest it, but I don't mind at all. Tell me about your father. Was he happy?"

Françoise raised her eyebrows and inhaled. "Well, it was... difficult He didn't speak for two years after the war."

"What, not a word?"

"No, not a word. I don't know, I suppose he must at least have said "I do" when they got married. He must have said a few words, just to stay alive. But I never heard him speak then. And Grand-mère said it was two years of silence. She says she can remember when he first spoke again. It was one morning. He quite suddenly stood up at the breakfast table and smiled. He said, 'We're going to the theatre in London tonight. We'll take the train at lunchtime.' I couldn't believe my ears. I was only nine years old."

"And you were living in England then?"

"That's right. In Norfolk."

"And was he all right after that?"

"Well... he was better. He talked and was very kind to me. He spoiled me really. But he wasn't in good health."

"And did he talk about the war?"

"Never. Not a word. From that day on it was as though it hadn't happened, according to Grand-mère."

"When did he die?"

"Just before I got married to your father. He was only forty-eight. Like a lot of men of that generation, he never really recovered."

Elizabeth nodded. "Just a couple of years before I was born."

"Yes," said Françoise sadly. "I wish he could have seen you. I wish so much he could have seen you. It would have made him... much happier in his heart." Elizabeth looked down at her plate. "And Grand-mère? How did she manage?"

"She was a wonderful woman. She loved him very much. She nursed him like a mother. She was the heroine of the whole story. You do remember her, don't you?"

"Yes, I do," Elizabeth lied. "Of course I do."

"I'm sorry," said Françoise. She held a napkin to her face. For a minute she couldn't speak. "I didn't mean to cry in a public place. I don't wantto spoil your happy day, Elizabeth. It would have meant so much to her too."

"It's all right," said Elizabeth. "It's all right. Everything's all right now." In the course of the summer, Elizabeth attended the prenatal clinic of her nearest hospital. There was some concern about her age; she found herself referred to as

"elderly" by members of the staff. The concern never became a worry, however, because she was never seen by the same person twice.

"Thank you, Mrs. Bembridge," said the doctor who examined her at eight months. "I'm sure you know the routine by now."

"I beg your pardon?"

"Well, number four, should be second nature to you."

It turned out he had been using the wrong notes. Elizabeth wondered who had been examined in the light of hers. They booked her into a bed on the day the baby was expected and told her not to travel by air in the meantime.

"Remember," said the nurse, "most first labours take a long time. Don't ring the hospital until the contractions are regular and painful. If you come in too soon we'll just have to send you away again."

Irene told her of some classes that the daughter of a friend of hers had attended. Elizabeth signed up and went to a flat in Kilburn where a fierce woman told a group of half a dozen expectant mothers about the different stages of labour and the kinds of painkiller available. Elizabeth made a note to ask for an epidural at the earliest permissible moment.

The child rolled and kicked inside her. The skin of her abdomen was subject to sudden bulges and rippling distortions as it stretched and turned. Her back ached and, as the summer wore on, she longed for cold winter days when it would all be over and she could breathe again.

Sometimes she would sit naked on the edge of her bed with the windows wide open to catch any breeze that might be passing. She held the weight of the child in the palms of her hands beneath the swell of her belly, where a thin brown line had appeared, running down into her groin. Above the hipbones the skin had stretched into small white scars, though nothing as bad as she had occasionally seen on the ravaged abdomens of women in the changing cubicles of shops. Most of the questions at the prenatal class had been concerned with what the women called getting their figures back, and the resumption of sexual relations with their husbands. Elizabeth found that neither question was at the front of her mind. She was preoccupied by an intense curiosity about her child. While she felt protective and maternal toward it, she also felt a respect that sometimes bordered on awe. It was a separate being with its own character and its own destiny; it had chosen to lodge and be born in her, but it was hard not to feel that it had in some sense preexisted her. She could not quite believe that she and Robert had created an autonomous human life from nothing.

After several days of complicated deceit, false trails, and cunning use of his answering machine, Robert managed to arrange matters so he could join Elizabeth for the week before the birth. He intended to stay with her afterward until she was fit enough to go down to stay with her mother. His wife believed he was travelling to Germany for a conference.

He had no desire to be present at the birth itself, but wanted to be on hand in case she needed him. He rented a cottage in Dorset, near the sea, where Elizabeth could relax for the last few days while he looked after her. They planned to return to London three days before the due birth date.

Robert was still edgy about the arrangement as they drove in Elizabeth's car through the Hampshire countryside. "Suppose it comes early?" he said. "What am I supposed to do?"

"Nothing," said Elizabeth, twisting awkwardly round from the passenger seat to look at him. "Just keep the baby warm. Anyway, first labours usually take about twelve hours, so even at the speed you drive we should be able to make it to the hospital in Poole or Bournemouth. Also first babies are very seldom early. So let's not worry."

"You've become quite an expert, haven't you?" he said, accelerating a little in response to her criticism of his driving.

"I've read some books. I haven't had much else to do this summer." The cottage was situated by a track on the side of a hill. It overlooked deep countryside and was about fifteen minutes from the closest town. The front door opened straight into the living room, which had a large stone fireplace and worn, chintz-covered furniture. There was an old-fashioned kitchen with a greasy cooker attached to a cylinder of gas, and cabinets with sliding glass doors. The back door led into a sizeable garden, at the end of which was a large chestnut tree. Elizabeth was delighted by it. "Do you see that little apple tree?" she said.

"That's where I'll set up my chair."

"I'll do it," said Robert. "I'd better go and get some food before the shops shut. Do you want to come with me?"

"No, I've made a list. I'll trust you."

"I was thinking in case you went into labour."

Elizabeth smiled. "Don't worry. It's not due for another eight days. Just stick a chair up there if you don't mind, and I'll be fine."

As the last sound of the car vanished down the track, she began to feel short, sharp contractions. They were like the cramp she sometimes had in her leg at night, but situated in or near her womb.

She breathed deeply. She would not panic. She had been warned that there were often false starts over a period of weeks. They were named after the doctor who had identified them. Braxton Something. Nevertheless, there was no harm in finding a telephone directory and writing down the number of the nearest hospital. She went into the living room and found what she wanted. There was a list of

"Useful Numbers" on a piece of paper stapled to the front cover of the directory. Both the hospital and a local doctor, only five miles away, were listed. Relieved, Elizabeth went back into the garden and sat down under the apple tree. There was another sharp contraction that made her gasp and put her hand on her belly. Then the pain receded. It drifted away and left her feeling calm and oddly powerful. The life was knocking inside her. By her own endeavours she would bring forth a child to carry on the strange history of her family. She thought of her grandmother, Isabelle, and wondered when and how she had given birth. Had she been alone and frightened in her disgrace, or had someone--Jeanne perhaps--been there to help her? Elizabeth became quite anxious as she thought of Isabelle alone with this frightening pain. No, she told herself. She would have planned for it. Jeanne must have been there.

Robert returned an hour later with the shopping and brought a drink out to her beneath the tree. He sat at her feet and she ran her hand through his thick, tangled hair.

The airless heat of August had gone, and it was a warm September evening.

"In a few days nothing will ever be the same again," said Elizabeth. "I just can't imagine it."

Robert took her hand. "You'll manage. I'll help you."

He cooked dinner following instructions she called out from the living room. It was dark by the time they ate, and there was enough chill on the air for them to light a fire. The smell of wood smoke filled the room as it billowed out from the grate. By leaving the front door ajar, they were able to drive it back up the chimney, but the resultant draught eliminated the benefit of the fire.

Elizabeth went to fetch a cardigan, and, as she climbed the narrow stairs, felt another contraction. She mentioned nothing to Robert. He was sure to want to take her to the hospital, where they would either keep her for days or, more probably, send her away again. She liked the cottage and she treasured the few days she was able to spend alone with Robert.

She slept badly that night. It was difficult to find a comfortable position in which to lie. The cottage bed was deep and soft, with a heavy eiderdown. She was glad when the dawn came with a loud, discordant sound of birds. Later, she slept. Robert looked at her sleeping face when he brought her tea in the morning. She was the most beautiful woman, he thought. He stroked back a strand of dark hair from her cheek. He felt sorry for her in the ordeal she was about to undergo. Her compelling confidence had not allowed her to understand how painful and exhausting it would be. He left the tea by the bed and went quietly downstairs. He walked in the garden, up to the chestnut tree, and back to the house. It was a sunny morning, with the sound of a tractor coming from a nearby field. Although he was calm, he felt his life had entered a brief period over which he would have no control; it was as though it was on railway tracks, under its own momentum. He would be tested.

That night Elizabeth had more contractions. He saw her bent over in the living room as he came through from the kitchen.

"It's nothing," she said. "It's just a Braxton thing."

"Are you sure? You look very pale."

"I'm fine." She spoke between clenched teeth.

They went to bed at midnight, and Robert fell asleep. At about three in the morning he was awoken by the sound of Elizabeth gasping in pain.

She was sitting on the side of the bed. He could just see her face in the moonlight that came in through the curtains.

"This is it, isn't it?" he said.

"I'm not sure," she said. "They're painful, but I'm not sure how regular they are. Have you got a watch? I want you to time them."

Robert turned on the light and watched the second hand crawl round the face of his watch. He heard Elizabeth gasp again. Six minutes had passed.

"Well?" he said.

"I don't know. This might be it. It might be." She sounded distraught. Robert wondered at what point the pain and fear would make her knowledge and instinct unreliable and compel him to follow his own judgement instead.

"Leave it for a bit," she said. "I don't want to go to hospital."

"That's silly, Elizabeth. If you--"

"Leave it!"

She had warned him that she was likely to become irritated. Many women used language they had barely heard before.

An hour passed, and the contractions became stronger and closer together. Elizabeth walked about the house, and he left her alone. He guessed she was trying to find some comfortable position in which to brace herself against the pain and she did not want him with her. He could hear her going through different rooms of the cottage.

He heard his name called, and ran to her. She was in the living room, resting her head on the sofa. "I'm frightened," she sobbed. "I don't want it to happen. I'm frightened. It's so painful."

"All right. I'm going to ring the doctor. And the ambulance."

"No. Don't."

"I'm sorry. I'm going to."

"Not the ambulance."

"All right."

A man's voice answered at the doctor's. "It's my wife you want. I'm afraid she's out on a call. I'll tell her directly she gets in."

"Thank you." Robert swore as he put down the receiver.

"It's coming! I can feel its head. Oh, God, it's coming. Help me, Robert, help me."

Robert breathed deeply. His mind, under the pressure of the panic, became suddenly clear. The child was only flesh and blood; it was designed to survive.

"I'm coming, darling, I'm coming." He went into the kitchen and then up to the bathroom. He grabbed armfuls of towels, which he brought down and laid on the carpet beneath Elizabeth's knees as she leaned over the sofa.

"The towels," she sobbed, "you'll stain them."

He gathered a pile of newspapers from the fireplace and spread them on top. He went and knelt by Elizabeth. She had rolled up her nightdress to her waist. As she squeezed her eyes tight and moaned again, he saw blood and mucus pour from between her legs.

"Christ, it's coming, it's coming," she said. She was beginning to weep again. Her upper body contracted and heaved once more, but produced only blood.

"Go away," she shouted at him. "Go away. I want to be alone." Robert stood up and went through into the kitchen, where he poured Elizabeth a glass of water. It was starting to grow light outside. From the window he could see down to a small cottage in the valley. He envied its inhabitants. He wondered what it must be like to be living a normal life, not on the edge of death and drama, but calmly asleep with the prospect of breakfast and an ordinary day ahead.

"Robert!" Elizabeth screamed, and he ran through to her.

He knelt down beside her in the blood.

"I don't know," she moaned, "I don't know if I'm supposed to push or not. I can't remember."

He put his arm around her. "I think if you want to, then you should. Come on, darling, I'm here. Come on, now. Push."

Another huge spasm ran through her, and Robert saw the flesh divide between her legs. Blood spurted downward and he saw, in the lamplight of the living room, the top of a grey skull begin to pulse and push at the unlocking entrance to her body.

"I can see the head, I can see it. It's coming. You're doing well, you're doing marvellously. It's almost here."

There was a pause as Elizabeth leant forward on the sofa, waiting for the next contraction. Robert looked down at the newspapers beneath her, one of which was open, appropriately he thought, at the Announcements.

Elizabeth gasped and he looked to where the top of the skull pushed and bore down again, demanding entrance. The body split and parted for it; the head emerged, whole, streaked with blood and slime, trapped around the neck by Elizabeth's divided flesh.

"Come on," he said, "come on, one last push and it's there."

"I can't," she said. "I have to wait for a contr... " Her voice failed. He put his face close to hers and kissed her. Strands of hair clung to her cheek, stuck down by sweat, as she buried her face in the chintz cushion of the sofa.; He took the baby's head between his hands.

"Don't pull," she gasped. "See if you can feel the cord round its neck." Robert gently probed with his finger, but feared to stretch the bursting flesh further. "It's all right," he said.

Then Elizabeth opened her eyes, and he saw them fill with a determination he had never seen in any human face before. She threw back her head and he could see the sinews of her neck rise up like bones. Her wild eyes reminded him of a horse that has finally scented home and clamps his teeth on to the metal bit: no power on earth could stop the combined force of muscle, instinct, and willpower as it drove on to its appointed end.

Elizabeth screamed. He looked down and saw the baby's shoulders driven out behind its head. He reached down and took them in his hands. Now he was going to pull.

The baby's shoulders were slippery between his palms, but as he increased the pressure, it suddenly burst free with a sound like a giant cork being released. In a rush of blood it slithered down into his hands and let out a single bleat. Its skin was grey and covered with a whiteish substance, thick and greasy about the chest and back. He looked down to the angry purple cord that looped back beneath Elizabeth's blood-smeared legs, then to the baby's genitals, swollen with its mother's hormones. He blew into its face. It cried, a jagged, stuttering cry. It was a boy.

He could not speak, but he found a towel less bloodied than the others, in which he wrapped the baby. He passed it back beneath Elizabeth's knees into her hands. She sat back on her heels amid the newspapers and the blood, holding the child to her.

"It's a boy," said Robert hoarsely.

"I know. It's... " She struggled on the word. "... John."

"John? Yes, yes... that's all right."

"It's a promise," she said. She was in a storm of weeping. "A promise... made by my grandfather."

"That's fine, that's fine." Robert knelt with Elizabeth and the boy; he put his arm round both of them. They stayed in this position on the floor until they were disturbed by a knock at the door. They looked up. A woman with a briefcase had let herself in, then knocked because they had not heard her.

"It looks as though I'm too late," she smiled. "Is everyone all right?"

"Yes," gasped Elizabeth. She showed her the baby.

"He's lovely," said the doctor. "I'll cut the cord." She knelt down on the floor. She looked up at Robert. "It's probably best if you go and get a bit of fresh air now."

"Yes. All right." He stroked Elizabeth's hair and laid his fingers against John's cheek.

The sun was up outside. It was a fresh, clear morning, overpoweringly bright after the darkness and panic of the cottage.

Released from the need to be calm, Robert heaved his shoulders up and down and forced out several long, sobbing breaths.

He walked a few paces up into the garden, and then the joy overwhelmed him.

He felt it coursing through his arms and his legs; the top of his skull began to crawl and throb as though it would lift off his head. The feeling that rose up inside him was like taking flight; his spirit lifted, then, as the confines of his body would not contain it, seemed to soar into the air.

He found that in his rapture he had walked to the top of the garden. He stopped and looked down. His feet were ankle-deep in chestnuts, which had fallen overnight from the tree, the glossy fruit bursting from the spiky green shells. He knelt down and picked up two or three of the beautiful, shining things in his hand. When he had been a boy he had waited every year for this day. Now here was John, his boy, another chance.

He threw the chestnuts up into the air in his great happiness. In the tree above him they disturbed a roosting crow, which erupted from the branches with an explosive bang of its wings, then rose toward the sky, its harsh, ambiguous call coming back in long, grating waves toward the earth, to be heard by those still living.

The End

About the Author

SEBASTIAN FAULKS worked as a journalist for fourteen years before taking up writing full-time in 1991. In 1995, he was voted Author of the Year by the British Book Awards for Birdsong, his fourth novel and the second to be published in America. He lives in London with his wife and two children.