that some German soldier found him out there, and held his head under the water?”
Joseph said nothing.
Cullingford let out his breath very slowly. “Thank you for taking the time to come and tell me personally, Captain Reavley. If you could tell me where he is buried, I should like to pay my respects, for his mother’s sake.”
“Yes, sir. It is just beyond Pilkem. I can show you, if you wish?”
“Yes, please. Then I can go on to Zillebeke. Miss Reavley, will you fetch the car.”
Judith drove, Joseph and Cullingford sat in the back. It was a bright, sharp spring day, sunlight one moment, drenching thundershowers the next, and the air was still cold with a cutting edge to the wind.
She drove in silence, aware of the crowding emotions that must be pulling Cullingford one way and then the other. She understood grief, confusion, anger, and how hard it was to fight through them without someone to listen, to help you find the reasons why you could miss someone so fiercely whom you have never missed in life.
She missed her mother. They seemed to have spent little time together, and much of that in quiet disagreement, pursuing different dreams, and yet the ache of loneliness that now she could never go back was deeper than she could have imagined. She missed all the comfortable little things that used to imprison her: time taken to cut and arrange flowers, the need to polish the silver or move the photographs when dusting the table. Now she thought of them as the cords of sanity that held her safe from the emotional violence of life. She caught herself thinking if only she could find a telephone she would hear her father’s voice. And then she remembered, and the tears choked her.
They were driving slowly along the rutted road toward Pilkem. They passed supply trucks going the other way, and long wagons drawn by horses, mostly laden with the powder shells. There was nothing to do but move as they could, wait when they had to, overtaking would be both dangerous and pointless. There were others ahead anyway, as far as she could see along the flat, straight road.
They pulled up where an ambulance had lost a wheel and men from a small column of relief troops were helping replace it, working patiently in the rain. She looked back at Cullingford in the seat behind her, half in apology for not being able to do any better. He was staring at the windscreen, his eyes unfocused. Was he thinking of his sister and how she must be feeling, and that he could not be there to say or do anything to help her? Had she been proud of her son, knowing only what he said of himself?
Alys would have been proud of Judith, and terrified for her as well. But then every mother in Britain was terrified for someone. Probably every mother in Germany, too, and so many other countries.
Cullingford’s face was impassive. He stared ahead. Only some delicacy of his lips indicated any feeling at all. She knew he had quarreled with Prentice because Hadrian had been furious about it. Hadrian was a quiet man, driven by duty and loyalty, meticulous in his job. The intensity of his emotion had startled her, as had the fact that he had refused absolutely to say what the quarrel was about.
Was Cullingford thinking of that, too, his mind racing over the reconciliation there could have been in the future, and now never would be? Did he think of Prentice as he had been when he was a child, times they had spent together when the world was so utterly different? They had been innocent, incapable of imagining the storm of destruction that had descended on them now. She still saw that bright, vulnerable look in the eyes of new recruits, when they did not know what the stench meant, and believed they could do something brave and noble that would matter. They had no conception how many of them would die before they had a chance to do anything at all, beyond the willingness, and the dream.
It took them half an hour to reach the place. The rain had stopped but the mud was still slick and in the pale sun the wet grass glittered with drops of water. Major Harvester met them, looking stiff, formal, and somewhat embarrassed.
“I’m very sorry, sir,” he said, saluting smartly. “Please accept my condolences.”
Cullingford looked at him with a flash of bitter humor. Judith wondered if he knew how Prentice had been disliked, and how much it hurt him. Whatever he had felt himself, Prentice was family. His loyalties must be torn.
“Thank you,” he accepted.
Harvester remained where he was, standing to attention on the strip of mangled grass. Judith could see in his sensitive, bony face that he felt he should add something more, the usual remarks that the dead man had been good at his job, loyal, brave, well liked, all the things one says over graves. Decency, even pity, fought within him against loyalty to his own men, and the truth. It was a kind of betrayal to use the same words for Prentice as for a soldier killed in battle. He stood there tongue-tied, unable to do it.
Judith agonized for him, and for Cullingford. It was too late for Prentice to redeem himself now; he would be remembered as he was. Perhaps only his family would think of him as he could have become.
Cullingford rescued him. “There is no need to say it, Major Harvester,” he said quietly. “Mr. Prentice was not a soldier. He does not warrant a soldier’s epitaph.” His voice shook so very slightly that probably Harvester did not even hear it.
“He . . . he was doing his job, sir,” Harvester said, his face softening with gratitude.
Joseph spoke at last. “Would you like to come this way, sir?” he asked. “I’ll take you to the grave.”
“Thank you.” Cullingford followed him.
Judith waited behind. She had disliked Prentice. She had no right to go now as if she mourned him, and perhaps Cullingford would value a few moments of privacy for whatever grieving duty permitted him. She watched him go, stiff and upright, intensely alone.
A sergeant came over and offered her a mug of tea. Harvester went about his duties.
Twenty minutes later Cullingford came back, his face white, his eyes bright and oddly blind. He thanked Joseph and walked to the car. Joseph looked for a moment at Judith, his face shadowed with anxiety. She would like to have had time to speak to him, ask how he was, and above all, what he had meant by his strange remarks about Prentice’s death. But not only was Cullingford her duty, he was her chief concern also. She smiled fleetingly at Joseph, and went to the car.
Cullingford was already seated, waiting for her, this time in the front passenger seat. Judith cranked the engine, climbed in and drove back onto the road toward Zillebeke.
She would like to have said something good about Prentice, but she knew nothing. To invent it would have been intolerably patronizing, in a way making it even more obvious that invention was necessary.
She was weighed down by a savage awareness of how alone Cullingford was. The men expected him never to show fear, exhaustion, or doubt of final victory. If he had weaknesses or griefs, moments when he was overwhelmed by the horror of it all, he must keep them concealed. There was no one at all with whom he could share them.
Joseph must have seen the conflict in him over Prentice’s death. He might have understood it as grief for his family, pity for his sister, regret for all the possibilities now gone, and perhaps a thread of guilt because he had disliked Prentice and found him a professional embarrassment. He respected the ordinary fighting man, British or German. He understood their strengths, and their weaknesses, and he hated intrusion into their privacy, or their need. Prentice had violated both.
But she did not know how to find words that would not commit exactly that same intrusion, and let him know how much of his emotion she had seen.
“I’m sorry for Mr. Prentice’s death, sir,” she said finally.
The traffic was slowed to a crawl. He looked at her. “Are you? It is unlike you to express a sentiment you do not feel, Miss Reavley, for courtesy’s sake.” There was the ghost of a smile on his lips. “Eldon was eminently dislikable, don’t you think?”
She was startled by his frankness. Had she made her feelings so very obvious?
“I’m sorry, sir, I didn’t mean to . . .” How could she finish? “To have been so . . .”
“Honest?” he suggested, his eyes bright and surprisingly uncritical.
“Undisciplined,” she corrected him, looking away, the heat burning up her face.
“Discipline does not require that you swallow your own ideas of morality,” he answered, turning sideways a trifle to look at her more comfortably. “You must have heard about the court-martial of the sapper, and the way Eldon behaved when Charlie Gee was brought into the Casualty Clearing Station?”
Of course she had heard. She knew it was Joseph who had restrained Wil Sloan from half killing Prentice. She was profoundly grateful for that. She liked Wil enormously. He was brave, funny, and generous. She loved the
