gauche
fanciful
stupid
ENGLISHMEN.
'Wyndham Lewis,' Brabourne muttered, puling strands of tobacco from his tongue as he folowed Laurence's glance. He offered the cigarettes to Laurence, then lit his own. As he struck and discarded a succession of faulty matches, he gestured to Laurence to speak.
Laurence, stil astonished that fate should have delivered Brabourne to him, tried to explain his presence methodicaly but, as he jumped from Mary to Holmwood to the execution in France, he realised how muddled he sounded.
Brabourne listened patiently and intently. 'So,' he said, finaly. 'You came here wanting to find out about the death of a London policeman in the summer, but now you're here, you've discovered you'd rather talk about my part in a firing squad in France in 1917? You know, when they were rebuilding these offices, the first year of the war, they found an old stone lion—probably Roman—hidden beneath our site. You never know what you're going to find if you start digging.'
'It is al a bit odd,' Laurence acknowledged. 'I'm realy only trying to find out what happened to a friend with whom I should never have lost touch.'
Brabourne raised his eyebrows.
'The thing is, his sister realy needs to understand why he shot himself.'
Laurence was aware it al sounded a bit lame. Why a man being treated for mental distress might kil himself was not a very profound mystery.
'But then one thing has led to another; his story was tied up with other stories and everything became more complicated. Or perhaps I've simply complicated it.
The policeman was one thread, a man shot for cowardice became another and finding you is just a stroke of unnerving luck.'
'And they're al connected.'
'I'm sorry?'
'They're al connected. John Emmett and Private Byers were part of the firing squad. Mulins was the APM there. Emmet was hit hard by it al ... So we end up at this place Holmwood,' he went on. 'It's what journalists do: remember things. Tie them together. However, I was hardly likely to forget those names. I never knew the names of the other soldiers involved but Byers had been in my platoon way back in 1915. And of course you probably already know that I met John Emmett, but not, perhaps, that I liked him. You may know that I defended Edmund Hart? In theory, at least.' He stopped abruptly. The ash fel from his cigarette onto the floor.
Laurence ran his hand through his hair. 'The execution. I've had one other account—from Byers, in fact, and he had tried very hard not to talk about it since.'
'Byers,' said Brabourne, nodding. 'Wel, it was a bad business, in that al capital punishment is bad. The offence and the trial were both mishandled, frankly. And the execution was a complete travesty of justice and dignity. But to set the record straight, it was desertion he was charged with, not cowardice. For cowardice, you have to be within hailing distance of the enemy. Hart never got as far as the enemy. And there was the whole question of shel-shock.' He shook his head slightly. 'Hart had been treated for it the year before. In England. But there were those who said he'd faked it and that went against him. He certainly wasn't deranged enough when I met him to gather the medical evidence. Some doctors were sympathetic; some weren't and would simply hammer home the nail already in the coffin. That and the fact that he'd spent every moment since his arrival trying to leave the regiment and get into the navy. Not popular. Not a man you'd want to join your club.'
'And you? What did you think?'
'He was sane enough. A rather awkward, immature man. Not a leader. Hart repeatedly said he was nervous. But he managed to make everyone else nervous too. The colonel had been hesitant about sending him forward on the day in question but he had no other officer available. In my opinion, Hart was a liability in action.
Not his fault. I didn't care if he was barking mad, neurasthenic or even a fake; he just wasn't officer material, as they used to say, or at least only, and redundantly, right at the end. But there was no question in my mind that he was, at the very least, confused and disoriented the night he disappeared. At the end of his tether; it's just his tether wasn't as long as some people's.'
He stubbed out his cigarette and threw it in the empty grate.
'We were at Beaucourt, late October. Three brigades, a ludicrously complicated plan of attack on enemy positions north of the river: a lot of pencil marks and stopwatches. The battalion moved forward. The men were overloaded with kit: it was a miserable evening; damp, foggy, no good for sleep.' He was lighting another cigarette as he spoke.
'We went forward as the third wave, with the German guns blasting away, and the wire in the fog like the tentacles of some hungry subterranean monster.' He added, almost with wonder, 'It was extraordinary: when the bulets struck the wire they sent diamond sparks into the mist: it was as if this monster we were approaching was electrified.'
Laurence didn't interrupt. He could see why Brabourne had done wel as a journalist.
'It was chaos up there. Hart wasn't in my company—but after a bit I hardly saw anybody anyway. My colonel was kiled; I saw two other dead officers recognisable only by their badges.' Brabourne drew in deeply on his cigarette, exhaled after a few seconds' contemplation and re-inhaled the smoke up his nose.
'At first there'd been something comic about my war. I joined in Monmouth. My father's family came from the South Welsh borders. Found myself with a bantam regiment. Byers too although he was transferred soon after. Al these midget Welshmen: five feet three inches or so. Until then I'd thought of myself as rather average build. Perhaps I was down under some mysterious military acronym: SFO, Short for Officer.'
Laurence guessed the man in front of him was about five feet eight inches.
