Ralph tapped his finger along the music, making a kind of low tum-te-tum noise. He wasn’t exactly singing along with it, but I could tell he was imagining it properly, just as if a band were playing in his head, with all the right instruments. “Well, it’s got the Butterworth stamp,” he said eventually. “No doubt about that.”
George leaned forward a little. “What do you think?”
“I think I’d like to hear the rest of it. This is obviously just a fragment, a few bars of a much larger work.”
“I can only write what I hear. As you say, it’s as if a chap next door is humming a tune. You can’t dictate which tune he’ll hum, you just have to go along with him and hope for the best.” George paused and looked serious. “Did you ever write any of it down, old boy?”
“Transcribe it, you mean?” Ralph shook his head slowly. “I was too scared to. Scared that if I wrote it down, the music might stop. And that if I put that music down on paper and convinced myself that it really was something I’d come up with, I’d have to admit to myself that I was going quite insane.”
“Or that the music’s real,” George said quietly.
“Now you know why I stopped working here, of course. No use to man nor boy if all I kept hearing was music instead of airplanes.”
“I hear the airplanes as well. It’s just that the music comes through when they’re not there.” He turned to me sharply. “Well, Wally, what do you make of it? Are we both for the nuthouse?”
“I don’t think so sir,” I said.
But in truth I wasn’t sure. George might have been younger than Ralph, but they were still old men, and they had both had their share of unpleasant experiences in the war. So had I, in a smaller way, and I still felt that I had my marbles …but what kind of condition would my head be in twenty or thirty years from now if the war just kept on the way it had?
Perhaps I would start hearing secret music as well.
“Wally,” Ralph said to me, “I want you to listen very carefully. We’re Royal Army Medical Corps men. We have a patient here and a duty to protect him. Understood?”
I nodded earnestly, just as if I were still taking ambulance classes in Dorking. “What are we going to do, sir?”
“You’re going to take him to the shelter. George will use my gas mask, and you will use your own.”
“And you sir?”
“I shall wait here, until you can return with a second mask.”
“But the seals, sir …”
“Will hold for now. Be sharp about it—we don’t have all afternoon.”
“No,” George said, more to me than Ralph. “He isn’t staying here. It’s his gas mask, not mine—he should be the one using it.”
“And you’re thirteen years younger than me, old boy. One of these days, for better or for worse, this war is going to be over. When that day comes, I’m not going to be much good for writing music—I’m worn out as it is. But you’ve still got some life in you.”
“No one’ll be writing much music if the Huns take over.”
“We thought the world of German music before all this started—Bach, Brahms, Wagner—they all meant so much to me. It seems funny to start hating all that now.” Ralph nodded at the still-flashing red light. “But we can discuss this later—provided we keep our voices down. In the meantime, Wally’s going to take you to the shelter. Then he’ll come back for me, and we can all sit around and joke about our little adventure.”
“I’m not sure about this, sir,” I said.
“RAMC, lad. Show some spine.”
“Sir,” I said, swallowing hard. Then I turned my attention to George. “I don’t think there’s much point arguing, sir. Perhaps it isn’t such a bad plan after all, anyway. I can sprint back with another gas mask pretty sharpish.”
“Take the mask,” Ralph said.
Something passed between them then, some unspoken understanding that was not for me to interpret. Time weighed heavily and then George took the mask. He said nothing, just fitted it over his head without a word. I put on my own mask, peering at the world through the grubby little windows of the mica eye-pieces.
We left the hut, closing the door quickly behind us. George could not run, but with my bad knee I was not much better. We started making for the first dish, with the promise of the shelter beyond it. Through the mask all the colors looked as yellowy as an old photograph, but George looked back at me and pointed out something, a band of darker yellow lying in the air across our path. Phosgene, I thought—that was the yellow one, not mustard gas. Phosgene didn’t get you straight away, but if they mixed it with chlorine, it was a lot quicker. I pressed the mask tighter against my face, as if that were going to make any difference.
It took an age to reach the shelter, with the distance between the sound mirrors seeming to stretch out cruelly. Just when it began to cross my mind that perhaps the shelter did not exist, that it was some figment of George’s concussion-damaged imagination, I saw the low concrete entrance, the steps leading down to a metal door that was still partly open. A masked guard, who might have been the same man Ralph and I had spoken to earlier, was urging us down the steps.
When the door was tight behind me, I whipped off my mask and said, “Give me yours, George—it’ll do for Ralph.”
George nodded and dragged the mask from his face, which was slick with sweat and dirt where the rubber had been pressing against his skin. “Good man, Wally,” he said, between breaths. “You’re a brave sort.”
But the guard would not let me leave the shelter. The red light above the door was telling him that the gas concentration was now too high to risk exposure, even with a mask.
“I have to go!” I said, shouting at him.
The guard shook his head. No arguing from me was going to get him to change his mind. We had been lucky to make it before they locked the shelter from the inside.
Looking back on it now, I’m sure Ralph knew exactly what would happen when I got to the shelter—or he had a pretty shrewd idea. What he said to George kept ringing in my head—about how the younger man would still be able to get some of that music down when the war was over. It was like one runner passing the baton to the other. I don’t think he would have said that if he had expected me to come back with another mask.
Because there was no wind that day, the gas alert remained high until the middle of the evening. When it was safe, I went out with two masks and a torch, back to the hut, just in case there was still a chance for Ralph. But when I got to the hut, the door was open and the room empty. Everything was neat and tidy—the box back on the shelf, the headphones back on their hook, the chair set back under the desk.
We didn’t find him until morning.
He was sitting in one of the seats attached to the steerable locator we had driven past on our way in. He must have known what to do because he had the headphones on, and one of his hands was still on the wheel that adjusted the angle of the receiver. The other chair was empty. The flattened disk was aimed out to sea, out to France, a few degrees above the horizon.
The thing was, they never did tell me
Now, I know people’ll tell you that faces relax when people die, that everyone ends up looking calm and peaceful, and as an ambulance man I won’t deny it. But this was something different. This was the face of a man listening to something very far away, something he had to really concentrate on, and not minding what he heard.
It was only later that we found the thing he had in his hand, the little piece of pink paper folded like an envelope.
Four days later I was able to visit George. He was in bed in one of the wards at Cranbrook. There were about five other men in the ward, most of them awake. George was looking better than when I’d last seen him, all messy and bandaged. He still had bandages on his head and arm, but they were much cleaner and neater now. His hair was combed, and his moustache had been trimmed.
“I’m glad you’re still here, sir,” I said. “I was frightened you’d be transferred back to Dungeness before I could get to see you. I’m afraid we’ve been a bit stretched the last few days.” I had to raise my voice because Mr. Chamberlain was on the wireless in the corner of the ward doing one of his encouraging “one last push”
