He turns to me, blinking against the light. ‘How are you?’ He trails his fingers gently against my bandaged hand, his touch igniting fire under my skin. ‘The other night... You spoke in your sleep. You said his name. Michael.’
‘Did I?’
He asks softly, ‘Where did he die?’
‘Here.’ I close my eyes. ‘Somewhere close by, I think.’
‘How—?’
‘I don’t know. Please, Danny, don’t ask me.’ I take a breath, open my eyes, trace the back of his hand with my fingertips. ‘I don’t want to know.’
‘Sometimes it’s better not to know upsetting things.’ He drops his hands to his sides, balling them into fists. When I reach for him, he flinches away as if I’d struck him. ‘Sorry, I’m... I’m all right. Come on, let’s get to work.’
I feel as if he were on the brink of telling me something. I also know that if I push now then he might never tell it. And so we continue with the mission we’ve been assigned, secrets kept, for now.
It turns out to be a long day. We head first in the direction of Fricourt where, after making diagrams of the German defences, we notice that every ravine and hollow on the British side has been converted into a battery position with dozens of big guns lined up, ready to fire. Around this area, a swarm of signallers are at work, pouring like ants over miles of cables laid out to form a vast new telephone system. I glance at Danny and wonder what kind of casualty reports might soon be zipping along those wires.
Moving on, we come to yet another ruined French village, its remaining walls honeycombed with shrapnel. A sergeant we meet in the square mentions a church tower that is still just about vertical and, after a perilous climb up its disintegrating staircase, we find ourselves in the belfry.
‘Feels like a stiff wind will knock it down.’ Danny speaks very softly, as if he believes his voice alone might be enough to topple the tower. ‘Everything else here is pretty much flattened, I wonder why Fritz hasn’t finished the job.’
‘I don’t know,’ I say, digging out my field glasses and focussing them across No Man’s Land. ‘Maybe they’ve been getting information from here.’
‘The Germans?’ Danny looks at me curiously. ‘But how?’
‘They’re fortifying their parapets over there...’ I murmur absently, dropping the binoculars and making a note. ‘Sorry.’ I refocus on Danny. ‘Well, you see, a few months back there was a suspicion that French spies in the area might be working for the enemy. A little to the south of our sector there was a town with a church just like this, visible to the German line. It was discovered that the local gravedigger had been climbing up into the tower at night and altering the hands of the clock.’
‘You mean a sort of code?’ Danny asks.
I nod. ‘A kind of semaphore that revealed information about our troop movements and gun positions.’
‘Jesus,’ he whistles. ‘What happened to him?’
‘The British handed him to the French police who shot him as a traitor. I’m not sure they even had a trial.’
‘But why did he do it?’
I shrug. ‘Money, I suppose.’
‘Or maybe he thought he was doing the right thing.’ Danny casts his gaze across wave after wave of barbed wire, lapping like a rusty tide against the trenches. ‘Millions of them over there must think they’re on the right side, just like millions of us think that we’re the heroes. I wonder who’s right.’
‘Neither,’ I say.
Danny turns to me. ‘I’m not sure you’d have said that a few days ago. The rules—’
‘The rules.’ I almost laugh. ‘They didn’t seem to mean very much when I was buried in that tunnel. It wasn’t the rules that saved me.’
He gives me a sad smile and is about to say something when the sergeant calls up from the churchyard, offering us a bite to eat from his platoon’s kitchen. There isn’t much more to see from the tower and so we ease our way back down the rickety stair. We’re close to the bottom when the final rotten step crumbles under Danny’s boot and he stumbles against me. I almost overbalance catching him, and we end up staggering against the stone wall, Danny with his back planted to the brickwork, my chest pressed to his. The echo of our collision fades in the throat of the tower. I take a breath, laugh; Danny does the same. Then, hesitating only a little, he rests his palm against the side of my face, his fingers gently brushing my ruined ear. When I begin to pull away, he whispers: ‘You don’t ever have to hide from me.’
The tower door groans on his hinges, swaying slightly in the breeze. I turn to look, and Danny cups the back of my neck, drawing me to him. His eyes are so blue, the lids lightly freckled. I graze my fingertips through his hair and, at last, his lips find mine.
For the first time since that autumn night in the summer house, I’m not thinking of shame and dishonour and grief and bloodshed. All I think, all I feel, all I know is pressed into this moment. And what I know is that I can’t let him go. Somehow I have to hold onto Danny, even when the whistle blows and we clamber over the top, I will keep him by my side. And I will keep him safe, for as long as I can.
27
18th June
Days pass and even our reconnaissance takes on a kind of routine. We explore the Front, we scale hillsides, we venture into bits of ditch that almost rub shoulders with the German line, we plot maps, make notes, sketch defences. We send our reports to HQ and hear nothing back. I’m not surprised. Our conclusions are probably about as welcome as a belch in a gas mask. That is, if Beddowes is even passing them on.
