The Children's Book - A. S. Byatt [344]
“It’s unbelievably disgusting and when you can do it you feel—oh, I expect, like nuns used to feel, when they deliberately did horrible things. I’ve got good at knowing which muscles to lift things with.”
She hesitated.
“You know, Philip—this house—my funny family—they feel like a dream and I’ve woken up. No, they feel like two dreams—one full of beautiful things—pots and paintings and tapestries and embroideries, and flowers and apples in the orchard—you know—and one full of interminable boredom and waste, and—things that were not right but were all that happened—I know you know. I’ve stopped asking you to marry me. I’ve woken up.”
Philip thought that among her wounded men she might find someone to love her. Because she made his bed more comfortable, and cleaned his body.
It was not because of Pomona that Philip decided to volunteer for the army. He thought about it. He looked at his work, at his drawings, at his jars and vessels, shining quietly. He had, over time, found many of Benedict Fludd’s secret caches of receipts for glazes, in holes in the wall, interleaved in books, Palissy’s memoir, Ruskin’s Modern Painters. He had mixed them, tried them, varied them, adjusted them. It was long, and slow, work, it was patient and sometimes frustrating, but he was a man who knew something, a man with a craft, a man who had wanted something single-mindedly and had got it. There were not so many men in the world who could say that.
He was thirty-five. He was not an eager boy. He came from a class which was cautious. He knew there was a good chance of his dying, and the pots dying with him.
He went, he thought, because the world had become a world in which his work was no longer possible. This thing had to be shared and sorted out and finished. It was something he appeared to have no real choice about being part of. He did not—after all his reflections and searchings—really know why. That was how it was.
He went to see Elsie and Ann.
“I thought you would,” said Elsie, when he told her. “You might go and see Mrs. Fludd, now and then.”
“She doesn’t know who’s there and who isn’t. But I will.”
Philip’s medical was satisfactory. He went to training camp in Lydd, and in the autumn of 1915, went out to Belgium and the battlefield.
In the autumn of 1915 the two Robins were in trenches on what had become a static front line around the Ypres salient. Ypres was shattered; its houses burning, its ancient Cloth Hall in ruins. The grand attempts to advance on the enemy had given way to a life in dugouts and foxholes. Shells came over, woolly bears and black crumps made craters and changed the earth from minute to minute. Fighting was mostly raids on the enemy trenches, from which many men did not return. They crept and flitted across No Man’s Land, and were spotted by machine-guns and picked off. At night in No Man’s Land, stretcher-bearers, including Charles/Karl, looked for the living in the sweet stink of the dead, and stumbled amongst severed hands, legs, heads and bloody innards. The living often begged to be put out of their pain, and Charles/Karl for the first time considered killing, and once, as a head with no face screamed weakly at him, did shoot.
The Robins were nimble at raiding and had a good company commander whom they trusted. They sat in the door of the dugout and ate Maconochies, a mixture of tinned meat and vegetables.