The House of Lost Souls - F. G. Cottam [109]
‘Whisky, Father?’
Lascalles accepted. He did not drink whisky. He had wanted to see Wheatley’s hands. But in this he was disappointed. The bottle and glasses were reached for from their shelf and the drinks poured with the gloves still on.
‘So. What in heaven’s name can I do, I wonder, to assist a Catholic priest.’
‘I would like to ask you, if I may, about your time aboard the sailing ship. Before the war. Where you went. What you did. Who you met. And what you might have learned.’
Wheatley was silent for a moment. He said, ‘I learned to cross an ocean without spending every waking moment vomiting over the side. I think that was probably my single greatest accomplishment, Father. And, of course, I learned to tie a fairly impressive array of nautical knots.’
Lascalles nodded. He looked at his glass on the table they shared. If anything, it was getting gloomier in the dugout, the wick of the storm lamp hung behind Wheatley burning ever shorter and its flame more feebly. There was just enough light for Lascalles to see the liquid in his glass tremor with the shock through the earth of great and distant shells exploding.
‘You don’t believe in magic, Father Lascalles,’ Wheatley said. ‘No more than you believe in God. No more than I do. This meeting is a charade. I think you should do the dignified thing. Give me a clean bill of spiritual health. Then go home and struggle with your own absence of faith.’
Lascalles took his matchbox from his pocket and shook free a match and stroked it sharply against the rough side of the box. He smoked a pipe in those days and his English waterproof matches were the long-shafted, brighter-burning sort designed to kindle a reluctant bowl of pouch tobacco. Wheatley held out the flat of a palm to shield himself from the glow of the flame and Lascalles saw two things. He glimpsed a couple of the bronze symbols strung from the runic bracelet on Wheatley’s exposed wrist. And he saw the skin on Wheatley’s brow, below his cap, above the raised gloved fingertips hiding his eyes from the flare of sulphorous light.
‘His skin was white, the colour of soft cheese,’ he told Mason and Seaton, both sipping wine now, instead of water, from their goblets. ‘And it was moving. It was stretching and pulsing as though tiny worms wrestled beneath it as it repaired itself, regained its life and cell structure. There seemed something both urgent and furtive about the process. It was hideous. Seeing that, knowing the significance of the symbols strung around his wrist, I knew that the bombardier whose testimony I read had been telling only the unembellished truth.’
‘Did Wheatley say anything?’
‘He said, “You’ve the manners of a potato farmer, Father. I’ve been disfigured by a gas shell and don’t wish to be stared at until I’m properly healed.” And then he laughed. Of course, he laughed.’
‘But you’d exposed him,’ Mason said.
‘My son, it was I who had been exposed. I had strutted through the English trenches to our assignation, the master of situations. For over a year by then, my secret scepticism, my clandestine but total lack of belief had protected me. I was immune to the dangerous optimism engendered by faith. I understood the meaninglessness of war and life. I had long ceased entertaining hope. I was perfectly equipped for survival. And then I saw what I saw that afternoon and was confounded. And exposed.’
Seaton said, ‘What did you say in your report?’
‘Only that I could not wholeheartedly recommend him.’
‘And what happened?’
‘I believe he was given a medal, decorated and then transferred. You have to understand the circumstances. Canvas field hospitals adrift in seas of mud, staffed by boy doctors recently qualified in the genteel examination rooms of Edinburgh or Oxford. Young men engulfed in horror. And the Germans did use experimental ordnance. Both sides did. His story would have been more plausible than the truth. That’s assuming he was even subjected to an examination. I cannot tell you if he was. I can tell you that I