Everyone Brave Is Forgiven(95)
Today was the worst it had been. In the bloodied light the men sweated and swore as the dust storm screamed above the moat. The parched earth would not submit to shovels and required to be loosened with picks before the lumps could be put into sacks and smashed against the stone walls of the fort. Only then did the stuff resemble soil. And when the precious seed potatoes were planted in their shallow drills and irrigated with the foul water from the kitchens and with the men’s own urine, the moisture was baked out instantly. It was difficult to believe that a crop would sprout from terra cotta.
With his rotten hand Alistair could offer no help. He made himself as useful as he could, bringing water from man to man and finding errands on which to send the weaker ones to give them some reprieve. A little before five, the men unearthed something. When Alistair saw a deep opening he called them off straight away and sent them back sixty feet.
The picks had broken through into a cavity, and the danger was the possibility of unexploded ordnance. The opening was around three feet square, and Alistair tiptoed to the edge. Lying flat, he looked over the lip of the hole and waited for his eyes to adapt. He could smell his hand, even with the wind.
The base of the hole became visible, and it wasn’t deep. He lowered himself in. His feet touched bottom while his head and shoulders were still above ground level. He motioned for the men to wait where they were, then ducked down out of the wind. He waited for the bile to sink back in his throat. His head pounded. Out of sight of the men, he allowed himself to close his eyes and recover for a moment.
He lit a match. Bones shone. The pit was small, five feet long by four broad. The bones were human, three skeletons aligned east-west with their feet toward sunset. They had neither skulls nor hands. Alistair was crouching on ribs that cracked under his shoes.
It was the fourth such pit they had found in the moat. There were no artefacts this time, nothing by which a layman might date the bones. In any case the story didn’t change. The island had been contested so many times, and the ground was so impenetrably rocky, that one did not have to dig for long in any patch of workable earth to learn what had happened to all the garrisons before one’s own.
He closed his eyes again. How nice it would be to lie down in these bones, and quietly die.
He struck another match. These men had got off rather lightly. With any luck they had lost their heads before their hands. In another pit, a week earlier, they had found a skeleton with every long bone broken and the rusty flakes of nails driven through the spine. Anyone might have done it—Malta was eight thousand years of nails. It was nothing one wanted the men to think about while they waited for the enemy’s paratroopers to arrive.
Alistair put his head and shoulders back out into the wind, gathered the last of his strength, and hoisted himself up on his good arm. He went over to the men and stood them down. He watched them disperse into dust, bent against the wind. Every bump of their spines was visible.
He kept Briggs back. The two of them said a few words over the remains, ran bayonets across some of the moat’s retaining sandbags, and filled up the burial pit with sand. When they were done it was after six and Alistair was exhausted. His eyes wouldn’t focus. He hauled his headache up to his room and took the bandage off his hand. It oozed yellow poison. He boiled water on his Primus, salted it, let it cool, and cleaned the wound.
Through the rifle port,the sun was setting. The scream of the wind fell slightly. He lit a lamp, reducing the wick so that it burned as little kerosene as possible. He propped the painting against the wall. Its gilt frame shone in the close glow of the lantern. The figures were best in such confidential light. He was so tired that he fell asleep sitting up. When he woke he found himself reaching out to the painting with his wounded hand, in fragile light as the kerosene exhausted itself. He stared at the dying hand before him, and for a moment he wondered which poor chap’s it was.
April, 1941
PALMER BROUGHT MORPHINE IN a brown glass bottle with a pipette built in to the stopper. Mary thought it ingenious. Everything about the tincture delighted her—that its smell was soberly medical, that a few drops on the tongue were a remedy for feelings, and that Palmer seemed able to procure it without fuss. On her return from hospital he had taken to appearing at three-hourly intervals with the pewter tray—not the silver, since her father was still away at the constituency. From the tray he would set down the brown bottle and a glass of iced water, on pewter coasters backed with green felt, together with fruits in a porcelain bowl.
Palmer would then dematerialize, leaving Mary to dispense the morphine at her convenience. This was proper, since it placed the stuff in the category of remedies, which were taken in private, and not of tonics, cocktails, or pick-me-ups, which were mixed to order and then taken while the butler hovered in case the blend was found to want celery salt, or bitters. The little bowl of fruit was appropriate too, since fruit was something—just like morphine—that one could easily take or leave.
Mary thought Palmer so painstakingly humane that she felt unable to disturb his sleep by ringing for him at three in the morning when she awoke in a sweat from nightmares that wouldn’t release her. Instead she sat up in bed with the covers pulled tight, wide-eyed while hallucinations of her dead children scratched away at the inside of the wardrobe doors. Kenneth Cox whispered behind the fire screen, behind the cheval mirror, behind her head so that she had to keep looking around.