Lovely War(79)

DECEMBER 1942


     Telegram





THE HEAVY QUIET of night falls over the hotel room.

The fire has died, and the room is nearly black. Only the subtle sheen of the gods offers any challenge to the night.

“Adelaide Sutton Mason,” Aphrodite says. “I remember her. She’d had a hard time of it, growing up. A rough father, who drank. She seemed in great danger of ending up with the wrong sort of man, before Frank came along.” She wiped her eye. “They had three very happy years together. And, of course, two children.”

“Two?” Ares looks up. “Mason’s photograph only had—”

“She’d written to tell him,” says Aphrodite. “She’d fallen pregnant. Remember? His injury? He was home for a while?”

All the male gods present are fathers. Possibly not the best of fathers—the subject is open to debate—but they are not without feeling.

Before their eyes, a scene appears. A doorbell rings. A skinny youth, his bicycle propped against a hitching post at the curb, stands on the front step. An envelope wobbles between his finger and thumb. The young wife whose eyes always get the joke peers around the slowly opening door.





HADES


     At the Beach





PRIVATE FRANK MASON tumbled rather abruptly into my realm.

“What happened?” he said aloud. “Where’s James?”

The fog was still thick around him, but the air no longer reeked of smoke and gunpowder. It smelled damp and green. He clambered to his feet and took a step forward.

“James?” he called. “You there?”

There was no sound of shells, no rifle shots ringing. Just the quiet of nature, that isn’t quiet at all, when you listen. Singing birds, buzzing insects, swaying branches.

The fog lifted. He saw himself in a field of dark grasses sprinkled with delicate white flowers. Up ahead he smelled the sea. After so many landlocked, trench-locked months, it beckoned to him.

He began to run.

He reached the sand and looked down to find that his feet were bare, his body loosely dressed in the lightweight trousers and shirt he used to wear, summers, on fishing boats. Damp sand squeezed between his toes, and salty spray blew in his face.

“I’m home,” he said.

The beach was mostly empty. It was early evening, when late afternoon leans toward twilight. A woman slowly walked along the water’s edge, holding a toddler by the hand.

“Oh no,” Frank said. “No, no, no!”

I appeared, then. An old sailor he used to know, ages ago, when he’d first joined a crew.

My presence didn’t surprise him. It rarely does; I’m the one each soul knows will find them in the end.

“I’m dead, aren’t I?” He turned to me then. “They got me, the bloody bastards!”

I nodded. “In a sense, yes. They did. But now you’ve got you.”

He sank into the sand and wept. “My poor wife, all alone,” he sobbed. “My little son, never knowing his daddy. And the baby!” He turned to me imploringly. “Who’s going to look after them?”

“They’ll get very good at looking after each other.”

That wasn’t much comfort. “It’ll be brutal on them,” he said. “You can’t pretend it won’t.”

“It will be brutal on them,” I told him. “You’ll need to send comfort and help. What you would do for them, if you could.”

He looked up. “Can it be done?”

“It can,” I told him, “when desire is strong.”

Frank Mason gazed dejectedly at his approaching family. His son sat down and began shaping a castle out of the sand.

“Take comfort,” I told him. “Remember: sleep brings them closer to you.”

He looked up hopefully.

“So does childhood,” I added. “Little ones see everything.”

Frank Mason Jr. turned toward his father and smiled a drooly smile. In a bound, his father was at his side.

“And watch out for cats,” I told him, by way of goodbye, though I don’t believe he heard me.





HADES


     Identity Discs—March 21, 1918





WHEN THEY FOUND James, it was dark.

He was in the relief trenches, hundreds of yards from the place where he’d gone up top to take out the storm troopers. He didn’t know how he got there.

It was clear to the medics, when they finally examined him, that he’d neither eaten nor drunk water at all that day. He lay curled in a dugout, and wouldn’t come out.

But he had to. The Germans had taken their lines. They were pressing hard against the BEF’s Fifth Army. British troops were in full retreat. He’d be a prisoner of war if they didn’t get him out.

He trained a rifle on anyone who tried to make him come out of his dugout. He was lucky not to be shot on the spot by an officer for that. They couldn’t allow their retreat to be slowed, and they couldn’t allow soldiers to fall prisoner and be tortured, maybe give up secrets.

Private James Alderidge had no secrets.

“Where’s Mason?” is all he would say. “Has anybody seen Mason?”