Because he was certain that he’d just discovered what had happened to the handsome elder brother with the laughing eyes and the devil-may-care expression. Alistair Seaforth had been killed not by the Germans, but by his own comrades. Far away from home, in some desolate corner of the Western Front, he’d been taken out at dawn, tied to a stake, and shot dead by a firing squad. And his name wasn’t on the Langholm war memorial beside his father’s because executed soldiers were not memorialized; they were legally forgotten. Except that Alistair’s brother, Charles, had refused to forget or to forgive. Looking over at the teenage boy in the photograph staring up at his elder brother with such devotion, Trave had no doubt what his reaction had been.
‘What do you want to know?’ asked Mrs Seaforth, sitting in the chair opposite her visitor and folding her hands in her lap. She held herself rigid, as if preparing for an ordeal that she wished she had been able to avoid.
‘Alistair was executed, wasn’t he? That’s why his name’s not on the war memorial,’ said Trave, dispensing with preliminaries. He understood instinctively that Mrs Seaforth wouldn’t be able to cope with too long a return into her troubled past.
She nodded, looking not at Trave but over his shoulder towards the front window, as if she were gazing into another room in another house that Trave couldn’t see.
‘Why? Why was he executed? What did he do?’ Trave asked.
‘He ran away. They found him hiding in a barn back behind the lines, covered in hay. They shot him two days later. I’m surprised he lasted as long as he did, to be honest with you.’
‘Why do you say that?’
‘Because he was shell-shocked. His nerves were shot to pieces; he was no good to them any more.’
‘How do you know?’
‘It was obvious when he came back here on sick leave in the November of 1915. He shook all down one side; he screamed in his sleep; he wouldn’t look at me. It was like he was ashamed of what he’d seen, ashamed of whom he’d become. He was nothing like the boy he’d been before. His laughter, his happiness, his singing’ — she stopped, groping for the right words — ‘it was all gone. Can you imagine that, Mr Trave? Can you imagine having a child, a perfect child — giving birth to him, rearing him, having such joy in him, so many hopes, and then see them all dashed?’ There was no change in her voice — she spoke rigidly, pitilessly — but there were tears running down her cheeks, and Trave felt ashamed to be causing her such remembered grief.
‘No, Mrs Seaforth. I can’t imagine,’ he said slowly, looking her in the eye. ‘And I’m sorry, truly sorry, to be dredging all this up, but I don’t have any choice. And there’s something I don’t understand. How could your son have ended up back in France if he was such a mess? Surely he would have been invalided out.’
‘Not France. Belgium. They shot him in Belgium on the eleventh of February 1916 — the day before his birthday. And they sent him back because the doctors said he was fit to go. They gave him electric shocks until he stopped trembling and then they put him on the train. He lasted four weeks and four days after that, and like I said, I’m surprised it was that long.’
‘How did you find out — about the execution? Who told you?’
‘Nobody did.’
Trave waited for Mrs Seaforth to continue, but she remained silent, still and silent like a statue. ‘I don’t understand,’ he said, perplexed. ‘You must have been told about it sometime, or you couldn’t be telling me about it now.’
‘Charlie found out after the war. He wrote letters to everyone over and over again until someone took pity and told him the truth. And then the people in the town got to know when they put up the war memorial and Alistair’s name wasn’t on it. Charlie hated them for that, but it was the law. You couldn’t blame them for following the law. Langholm’s a tight-knit community and the people here have been very good to me over the years. I don’t think I’d have got through my troubles without their support.’
‘You say he found out after the war?’
‘Yes.’
‘So that must mean your first husband didn’t know that Alistair was executed.’
‘No, he didn’t. Jack had an exemption because he was a skilled farmworker, but then when the news came that Alistair had died, killed in action, he was so angry that he volunteered. I tried to talk him out of it, but he wouldn’t listen to me. He wanted blood, German blood, on the end of his bayonet. You know what I mean — an eye for an eye; a tooth for a tooth. But he didn’t get his wish, silly fool. He got trench fever instead within a few days of getting out there, lingered for a week or two in a base hospital, and then died on the boat home. Trench fever’s caused by lice, apparently. Did you know that, Mr Trave? Lice!’ She spat out the word as if it perfectly summarized the waste, the awful pointlessness, of her husband’s death.
‘Did Charles know that his father joined up to get revenge for Alistair?’ asked Trave, shaking his head with disbelief at what the woman across from him had had to go through. The lie about the execution that had led directly to her husband’s death seemed a diabolical act, unworthy of a civilized country.
‘Yes, of course he knew. Charlie was mad to go himself, except he was too young. The two boys were as close as twins when they were growing up, even though they were more than three years apart. And Charlie idolized Alistair — you can see that in the picture,’ she said, pointing over at the mantelpiece.
‘And so how did he feel afterwards, when he found out that Alistair was executed, that the Germans had nothing to do with it …?’
‘That we’d been lied to? That my husband had died for no reason?’
‘Yes,’ said Trave. ‘That too. What was Charles’s reaction?’
‘What do you think it was? He was angry — angrier than I’ve ever seen anyone before or since.’
‘With the War Office?’
‘With everyone. With the officers who’d presided at the court-martial; with Field Marshal Haig; with the poor soldiers who’d been on the firing squad, except that he couldn’t find out their names. Not that he didn’t try, but there’s a law against that kind of disclosure, apparently — a sensible one, if you ask me. And then he was angry with me too. Me more than anyone, I came to think later.’
‘You?’ asked Trave, surprised. ‘Why would he be upset with you?’
‘Because there came a time when I didn’t want to grieve any more,’ she said wearily. ‘I started to feel like I’d survived for a reason and it wasn’t just to be angry and unhappy for the rest of my life. I wanted a second chance, and John, my second husband, offered me that. He’s a good man and he was prepared to take Charlie on as well, but Charlie wouldn’t hear of it. He said I was betraying his father and Alistair by remarrying, that I was no better than a common prostitute selling myself to the highest bidder. Yes, he said that,’ said Mrs Seaforth, seeing the appalled look on Trave’s face. ‘And, looking back, I sometimes think that the only thing that would have satisfied him is if I’d committed suicide like one of those Hindu women, who throw themselves on their husbands’ funeral pyres when they’re widowed and burn themselves to death. Maybe he might have loved me then,’ she said bitterly, ‘but, as it was, I became the great Satan. He got his scholarship to London University and turned his back on me. Oh, he came home a few times in the first couple of years, but it was just to abuse me. And eventually he stopped coming at all. Like I said, we haven’t spoken in fifteen years, which makes me sad, makes me cry at night sometimes, remembering him when he was a little boy holding my hand on the way to school. But I have to tell myself that he’s not that child any more, and hasn’t been for a long, long time. And really I think it’s for the best that we don’t see each other. Better for him and better for me.’
She finished speaking and her head dropped, as if she were empty; as if she’d said all she could and had nothing left.
And Trave knew that he had achieved the purpose of his journey. He’d found out that Charles Seaforth had more reason to hate his country than any man in Britain. It all made sense except for one thing, one piece of the jigsaw that didn’t fit.
‘Your husband’s John Seaforth?’ he asked. ‘You changed your name when you were married.’
‘Yes, of course.’
‘And your marriage made Charles angry, so angry that he stopped seeing you.’
‘Yes,’ she said impatiently. ‘I already told you that.’
‘So why did Charles change his name to Seaforth too?’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ she said, clearly taken aback. ‘He’d never do that.’
‘I can assure you he has. He’s Charles Seaforth to everyone down in London. But I agree it makes no sense, unless …’ Trave paused, and then suddenly he understood. ‘He did it to hide his connection with his past. And in a
