‘The boy I love is up in the gallery,
The boy I love is looking now at me...’
A hand gripped my knee. Danny mouthed:Stephen? Are you all right?
I put down the piece of paper and placed my hand over his. It felt warm, strong, steady, reassuring.I am,I mouthed back. He lifted his thumb in response and very gently stroked the side of my index finger. I swallowed hard. The touch of his skin on mine. He had held me close in that alleyway back in Authuille, our hearts hammering together, but this was a quieter kind of intimacy. Again, I felt the flutter in my stomach, a thrilling heat radiating into every corner of my body, making the little hairs on my arms stand to attention. I licked my lips. His own lips, so soft, so beautiful, half-open, sketching a hesitant smile. Withdrawing his hand from my knee, he wrote:Can I ask – who was the boy in your sketch? The one from the train?
I took a deep breath. Images flickered through my head like cartoons in a child’s flipbook. Years of friendship condensed into a single burst – two small boys meeting outside a school gate, shy introductions encouraged by our mothers; games of Robin Hood in the woods with bamboo bows and arrows; summer days swimming in the river; winter-blue hands building snowmen; jokes, laughter, tears, tantrums, arguments and reconciliations, birthdays, Christmases... A touch of lips in the summer house; a final goodbye:We’ll get through this, Stephen. We’ll survive and we’ll see each other again, I promise.
I wrote:Someone I cared about at school. Very much. His name was Michael.
I turned away, glancing back down the tunnel to the pinpoint of light shining at its end. Danny again reached for my hand. He held it for a long time.
Hours passed. The spears of daylight weakened. We made more observations – passing patrols, the changing of a gunner. At just after seven in the evening, the Front was quiet again and Danny pulled some packages from his satchel, all wrapped up in greaseproof paper. Corned beef sandwiches with thick buttered bread. When we’d finished eating, he passed me another note.
Will you ever sketch me?
I wanted to draw him, very much. I thought of that moment in the garden of the old villa. Danny standing naked beside the waterlogged crater, his beautiful body dazzled by moonlight. The sweep of his back, the slope of his strong shoulders, that crop of Titian curls stark against the marble of his skin. How could I even begin to capture all that on a scrap of paper in the gloom of this underground chamber?
Another time.
Danny read and smiled, but I could see the disappointment in his eyes.
The night wore on.
Now, approaching midnight, I pull out the periscope for the last time and slide it through the grass-covered ceiling. No Man’s Land rolls out in all its eerie emptiness, a blighted nothing lying under the indifferent gaze of the moon. The enemy trenches appear quiet and still. Except... a movement just to the south. The gleam of a black barrel, shiny as sealskin, emerging from a camouflaged parapet. I hear a crack and in the next moment the periscope in my hand shatters, bits of metal and glass flying everywhere. Voices erupt out of the night, a German calling up to his gunner.
They’ve seen where we’re hiding!
Danny grabs my hands, turning them over in the pale shafts of moonlight. I see blood in my palms and think again of that Rubens painting in my father’s study. Christ with his still-bleeding wounds, cut down from his cross. Danny opens his mouth to speak but before the words can leave his lips, the drum of a hundred bullets punches into the earth above our heads. And now other voices are shouting, British soldiers hollering down the hole.
‘Get the hell out of there, lads! You’ve been spotted! Quick about it now, or you’re both dead men!’
24
I scrabble around, gathering up the last of my notes and sketches and stuffing them into my satchel. And then I’m pushing a complaining Danny into the tunnel ahead of me.
‘You’re hurt,’ he shouts back. ‘Stephen, you go first.’
‘No time to argue,’ I tell him. ‘Get moving!’
We slither into the darkness, the throat of the tunnel echoing with the bellow of men, languages meeting and distorting around us. The ceiling shivers. Particles of earth rain down, falling into my eyes and mouth. I spit, blink, focus on the torchlight that has suddenly sparked over Danny’s lunging shoulders. Far-off faces appear in the gap, urging us on. My knees piston across the hard ground, my palms meeting tiny stones that dig into the lacerations made by the exploding periscope. Tiny stabs of pain begin to cut through the adrenalin pulsing through me.
Thunk! Thunk-thunk-thunk-thunk!A wild scattershot of bullets pummelling the ground above us. There’s little chance of them penetrating the tunnel, but still their impact shocks heavier clods of earth onto our heads. A small avalanche cascades in front of me, burying Danny’s boots and caking my hair. But it’s all loose soil and easily shaken off. What worries me more is the creak and groan of those wooden struts holding up the ceiling, like the hull of a ship battered by a stormy sea.
Danny glances back at me, eyes wild. ‘Are you—?’
‘Keep going,’ I shout. ‘Don’t stop till you’re out.’
He burrows on towards the light that sways at the tunnel mouth. Hands reach into the cavity, waving, beckoning, ready to pull us free. Danny is within inches of those grasping fingers when a horrified cry reaches us.
‘Watch out, the bastards are sending over grenades!’
I stop dead. In my mind, I see them again:stielhandgranate, those torch-like missiles arching against the snow-speckled sky, falling between our feet like bowling pins. Glances exchanged, my last glimpse of the living, breathing Captain Philip Danvers.
Then...whoomphhh!The ground lurches, the ceiling of the tunnel bulges and buckles. I scream at Danny to get out and watch as hands lock around his forearms, wrenching him free just as a curtain of earth descends and the world goes dark.
A crush of blackness swarms around me, engulfs me, imprisons me, entombs me. I try to reach out but I’m held fast, like a man tied to a punishment post. I can’t see, can’t move, daren’t even try to breathe. But I know it’s only a matter of time. Instinct must eventually take over and I won’t be able to fight it. I’ll have to open my mouth and suck down the throatful of dirt that presses like an insistent kiss against my lips.
