Stephen felt Hunt’s hand reach out and help him into the trench. Byrne slithered in after him.

“Well done, Hunt,” said Stephen. “I’m going to give this man a drink now. Do you like whisky, Byrne?”

“Not half.”

“If Petrossian wants to know where Byrne is, tell him he’s with me.”

“All right.” Hunt watched the men move off over the duckboards. A few yards down the trench Jack Firebrace was sitting on the firestep with a cup of tea. He was regaining his strength after six hours underground. His thoughts turned toward home. Eight-and-a-half years earlier, when his wife had given birth to a son, Jack’s life had changed. As the child grew, Jack noticed in him some quality he valued and which surprised him. The child was not worn down. In his innocence there was a kind of hope. Margaret laughed when Jack pointed this out to her. “He’s only two years old,” she said. “Of course he’s innocent.” This was not what Jack had meant, but he could not put into words the effect that watching John had on him. He saw him as a creature who had come from another universe; but in Jack’s eyes the place from which the boy had come was not just a different but a better world. His innocence was not the same thing as ignorance; it was a powerful quality of goodness that was available to all people: it was perhaps what the prayer book called a means of grace, or a hope of glory. It seemed to Jack that if an ordinary human being, his own son, no one particular, could have this purity of mind, then perhaps the isolated deeds of virtue at which people marvelled in later life were not really isolated at all; perhaps they were the natural continuation of the innocent goodness that all people brought into the world at their birth. If this was true, then his fellow-human beings were not the rough, flawed creatures that most of them supposed. Their failings were not innate, but were the result of where they had gone wrong or been coarsened by their experiences; in their hearts they remained perfectible.

This love Jack felt toward his son redeemed his view of human life and gave substance to his faith in God. Where his piety had been the reflex of a fearful man, it was transformed into something that expressed his belief in the goodness of humanity.

His own beliefs, but it didn’t matter to him: his son was all he cared about. He had not had the chance to say good-bye when he left and had corresponded with the boy through messages in Margaret’s letters. At the front and underground he was often too preoccupied to think of John and Margaret, to form exact pictures of them in his mind, but when he lay on the cross at the tunnel face or strained his ears on sentry duty there was always a sense in which they were with him. His endurance was for them; the care he took to try to stay alive was so that he would see the boy again. He watched as Byrne and Stephen disappeared, then prayed hard for John’s life. The smell of the earth in the trench wall reminded him of his own boyhood, when he would fall in the mud during a game of football or play at building a dam in the stream that ran through the open ground behind the factory: there was this enduring smell of soil and boyhood. He was quite alone, as he had been always, but now with the urgent life of another boy in his heart. The next day there was a letter for Jack from Margaret. He decided not to open it until he had come back from underground. He might be killed in the tunnel and it would be better to die in ignorance if the news from the hospital was bad. If it was good, then it would seem all the better for having been kept.

It was a quiet day. Some of the division was already packing up to leave. In the morning Jack took out a sketchbook and made some drawings of his friend Arthur Shaw, whose big head had a sense of weight and shadow that yearned for the soft lines of the pencil. Shaw sat placidly while Jack went to work, his eyes flickering up and down from paper to face and back again, the pencil held lightly in the tips of his fingers. Tyson came and looked over Jack’s shoulder and made a short, appreciative grunt. The drawing was simple and lacking in refinement, but Jack had the ability to make a likeness and this impressed Tyson, who wanted to be drawn himself. Jack was mysterious in his choice of subjects, however. There were a few pictures of lorries and stores, some of the villages in which they went to rest, the occasional group scene taken from memory of a concert hall or estaminet, but most of his sketchbook consisted of portraits of Arthur Shaw.

In the late afternoon Sergeant Adams arrived with Jones and O’Lone, and the men formed up to go underground.

Michael Weir had detailed Adams to be in charge while he spent the evening in his dugout with a book. At about eight o’clock Stephen pulled back the gas curtain and let himself in. He was in a state of nervous excitement.

“Go where?”

“The surprise I told you about. Come on. Bring that whisky bottle.” Weir stood up hesitantly. He was afraid of what Stephen was planning. He swallowed an inch of whisky from the bottle and felt it add its small effect to the several he had already drunk. He guessed from his manner that Stephen had also been drinking.

Weir breathed in deeply as they emerged into the darkness. It was a dry summer night and there was only the distant sound of some halfhearted shelling a mile or so down the line, like a routine metal lullaby to warn the forgetful that death could come to them even in their sleep.

Weir followed Stephen down the communication trench, through the reserve line, and out into the rear area where the headlights of lorries were approaching from the tree-lined roads, illuminating large piles of kit that had been laid under tarpaulin for transport. CSM Price strode about at the railhead, where a huge artillery piece was being labouriously winched on to a train. With clipboard and checklist he had temporarily resumed his old warehouse occupation.

Stephen hung back for fear of being seen by Price and ushered Weir over to a muddy area at the end of a line of poplars where two men were leaning against a motorcycle, smoking.

“I need that bike,” he said. “Major… Watson needs it urgently.” He nodded toward Weir.

“Major Who?” said the man, looking doubtfully at Weir, who was wearing his white pullover and soft shoes with no sign of rank.

“Special operations,” said Stephen. “Take these and say no more about it.” He held out a tin of fifty Capstan cigarettes.

“Can’t do that, mate,” said the private, taking the cigarettes anyway. “But there’s a motorbike down there, behind the shed, that no one’s using. Despatch Rider got hit in the arse by a farmer. By a bloody shotgun!” He laughed. Stephen found the bike and shook it to and fro to see if there was petrol in it. There was a faint but adequate sound of liquid from the tank. He kick-started the machine and stamped it into gear. Weir climbed cautiously on to the back and held on. The bike had only one seat, so he had to perch on a rack that had been fitted over the rear wheel. His legs hung loose on either side.

As they accelerated over the rutted track and down toward the road, Stephen felt a leap and surge of exhilaration. They had left behind the death and turmoil and filth; they were breaking free into the darkness of normality, with food and drink, the sound of women, and the sight of men whose first thought would not be to kill them. The bike roared its way on to the metalled road.

They saw the lights of the village, sparse and dimmed, and a lit window on the extreme western edge that had become famous in rumour. Stephen felt Weir’s fingers digging into the flesh between his ribs.

The building was a farm with a low brick house on one side and barns for livestock and straw making up a square. Stephen propped up the bike at the entrance, while Weir took the bottle from his pocket and sucked thirstily.

“Listen, Wraysford, I don’t think I want to go on with this. Look at this place, it’s pretty squalid and–“

“Come on. It’s a woman, a soft creature who will be kind to you and make you feel well. It’s not someone with a gun.”

He took Weir’s arm and led him across the courtyard. Weir missed his footing as they neared the door. At the entrance Weir began to tremble.

“Christ, Wraysford, just let me get out of here. Let me go home. I don’t want this.”

“Home? Home? A trench filled with rats?”

“If the red hats find us we’ll be shot.”

“Of course we won’t be shot. Disciplined, perhaps. Made to resign our commissions. Pull yourself together.”

They went through into a dim parlour with a stove in the middle of the floor. An old woman was sitting smoking a pipe. She nodded at the two of them in the doorway. She shook her head when Stephen began to speak and pointed to her ear.

“I want to leave,” Weir hissed.

Stephen gripped his wrist. “Wait.”

The old woman let out a screech toward the door that led into the house. They heard footsteps, then a female voice. A woman of perhaps fifty appeared on the dark threshold.

“I wasn’t expecting people tonight,” she said.

Stephen shrugged. “My friend was anxious to come and see you. I’m worried that he may be a little nervous. He wants you to be very patient.” Stephen spoke as fast as he could in the hope that Weir would not understand.

The woman smiled grimly. “Very well.”

“You have a daughter, Madame?”

“What is that to you?”

“I understand that she also… “

“That is none of your business. Tell your friend to come with me.”

“Go on.” Stephen pushed Weir in the back and watched him go faltering and afraid into the darkness on the other side of the door.

Stephen turned to the old woman and smiled. He made a drinking gesture and took out a five-franc note from his pocket. She went stiffly to the corner of the room and produced a bottle of wine and a dusty glass.

Stephen took a chair beside the stove and rested his elbow on the long flue that ran across to the wall. He raised his glass toward the old woman and drank the bitter white wine.

He wanted Weir to know what it felt like to be with a woman, to feel that intimacy of flesh. It made no difference to him whether Weir died in all innocence, but he felt it was in some way necessary for him to understand the process that had brought him into being.

Escaped from extermination, Stephen feared nothing any more. In the existence he had rejoined, so strange and so removed from what seemed natural, there was only violent death or life to choose between; finer distinctions, such as love, preference, or kindness, were redundant. The flesh of a widowed farmer’s wife, paid for in the wages of killing, was, in the reduced reality inhabited by him and Weir, a better choice than the flesh of Wilkinson, shell-shattered in section, its banal brain cell and membrane dripping memory and hope on to his shoulder. He stretched out his legs and saw his heels mark the beaten earth of the farmhouse floor. He had almost finished the bottle of wine and could feel it extinguish his last trace of caution, his last recognition of the spurious ways and codes of peacetime behaviour. He felt aged and weary but very calm. The older woman had fallen asleep. Stephen went softly to the corner of the room and found another bottle in the cupboard. He poured himself a glass and took his seat again, waiting in the dim light.

When Weir returned he looked shaken and pale. The black marks beneath his eyes were visible even in the gloom of the parlour. Stephen looked at him interrogatively. Weir shook his head. “You go.”

“No, thank you. This is your expedition. I have no interest in her.”

“She wants you to go. Go and see her. Go and see her, you bastard. You started this. You finish it.”

Weir was more agitated than he had been even during the bombardment. Stephen had a sudden feeling of panic. “What have you done?” he said.

“What have you done, you raving idiot?”

Weir sat down heavily in a chair and held his face in his hands.

Terrible pictures formed in Stephen’s mind as he ran through the door. He was confronted by a junction with four passageways. He called out.

The lighting was so bad he could barely see where he was going. He fumbled down a wall and pushed open a door. There was a fluttering of chickens inside. He slammed it closed with a shudder. He ran down a second passage, pushing open doors, closing them in relief when no fearful sight met his eyes, but pressing onward in desperation.

He heard a woman’s voice from behind him. “Monsieur?” It was a young, dark-haired woman. She had large, soft eyes and her hair was tied back with a red ribbon. Stephen stood speechless.

“What do you want?”

“I’m looking for… for your mother.”

“This way.”

She took him by the arm. They went into a room with a red carpet and screens with oriental decorations. Around the door was a wooden cut-out shaped like a minaret. The floor was of the same beaten earth as in the parlour. Stephen looked aghast. The young woman took him behind a screen, where a double bed lay beneath a homemade canopy of cotton silk. There were half a dozen candles on the floor and one in the window.

“Don’t be alarmed. Give me the money now.”

The last sentence restored a kind of normality.

“I don’t want to… I just came to see that everything was all right.” He heard a laugh from the other side of the screen. It was the middle-aged woman who had taken Weir off with her. “All right. As good as it will ever be.” She came and stood beside Stephen. He could smell some sweet scent on her. “Your friend is very strange. I take him like this”–she cupped her hand in Stephen’s groin–“and he backs away.” She laughed. “It is long and soft, and when I touch it, he begins to cry.”

She was older than Stephen had thought. In the candlelight he could see her more clearly than in the parlour. She sat on the bed and pulled up her skirt to her waist, then lay back and spread her legs. Stephen had never seen someone of that age naked. She put her hand into a bowl of disinfectant, then ran her fingers through the gash between her legs, through the coarse hair and the scarlet flesh that parted at her familiar touch.

Stephen began, like Weir, to back away. Then he laughed. He reached out to the young woman and took her arm. “You, Mademoiselle, yes. Otherwise, nothing.” The older woman got off the bed and came toward him, pulling down her skirt. He felt her hands on the front of his trousers. She slid her fingers inside, and pulled out what she wanted, a piece of limp flesh, like a butcher taking something from display and laying it on the wooden board. When he felt her mouth close on it, Stephen braced himself not to back away from her slavering attention. He looked up and saw the young woman undressing. The candlelight caught the round white curve of her buttocks as she stepped out of her underclothes and Stephen felt himself stir in the woman’s mouth.

She stood up and smiled, holding his stiffening flesh in her hand. “You English,” she said, and vanished behind the screen.

It did not cross Stephen’s mind how ridiculous he must look. His skin was bursting, stretched almost to transparency by the blood pumped down into it. The girl smiled at him from the bed. She had small round breasts. She sat with her legs straight out in front of her and her arms folded across her stomach. There was no sheet on the bed.

“Take off your clothes,” she said.

Stephen dumbly did what she told him. He stood naked in front of her. The girl was patient, as though she was accustomed to dealing with awkward soldiers. Stephen looked at her. Almost six years had passed since he had touched a woman. She was beautiful. There was light in her dark brown eyes; there was air and life in her limbs. The flesh was young and un-wounded. He wanted to drown himself in her, to bury deep into the cells of her skin and to forget himself there. She was peace and gentleness; she was the possibility of love and future generations.

As he took a step toward the bed he remembered a day when another woman had lain naked like this, her legs parted in front of his eyes, and he had kissed her there, allowing his tongue to open her, as though this unlocking would provide a way into her deepest self. He remembered her gasp of surprise. He had obliterated himself in her; he had purged his longing and desire; he had lodged and invested himself in her body. In her trust and love for him, he had deposited the unresolved conflicts of his life. Perhaps his self was still in her-betrayed and unhealed. The body was only flesh, but she had taken hers away from him; and in her physical absence there was more than missing flesh: there was abandonment. The tenderness he had felt toward the dark-haired girl was gone. She smiled at him and rolled on to her side, so he saw again the white swell of her hip, too curved to allow the passage of her arms in running or aggression.

When he looked at the girl’s upper body, the ribs and spine, he thought of the shell casing that stuck from Reeves’s abdomen; he thought of the hole in Douglas’s shoulder where he had pressed his hand through almost to the lung.

His tenderness was replaced at first by a shuddering revulsion. Then his mind emptied. There was only this physical mass. He was losing control. The old woman smearing disinfectant between her legs was unrelated to anything he had known with Isabelle. Her daughter’s body was no more than animal matter, less dear, less valuable than the flesh of men he had seen die.

He did not know whether to take the girl or kill her.

In the pocket of his trousers beside his feet was the knife he had carried on patrol. He bent down and took it out, opening it against the palm of his hand. He went over and sat on the edge of the bed.

The girl looked at him, her eyes wide, her mouth open but unable to produce a sound. He felt no pity for her ignorant fear.

He turned the knife so that the blade was in his palm, then ran the handle of it down between her breasts and over her thighs.

He did not know what he was doing. He hated her for not having seen what he had seen. He felt the skin on her legs give a little under his pressure. The knife left a thin white trail where the flesh was momentarily parted before the blood rushed in again beneath the skin. He wanted there to be more than just this flesh. He rested the handle on the hair between her legs, the blade pointing up towards her abdomen. The girl looked down in horror at the reflections of light on the steel. Stephen took his hand off the knife. It lay balanced. The girl was too frightened to move. Eventually she slid her hand slowly up her thigh and took the knife, her eyes on Stephen all the time. She held the blade in her fingers, closed the knife, and threw it to the far side of the room, where it landed on the earthen floor. Stephen looked down at the bed. His mind, which had been blank, was flooded with thoughts and recriminations.

The girl had regained her calm. She did not scream for help or remonstrate; she looked at Stephen’s broken attitude on the bed, his head bowed, his excitement shrunk. Her relief made her generous.

She touched his hand.

Stephen jumped and looked up. He could not believe her touch. It was tender. She should have killed him.

He shook his head in bewilderment. “What…?”

She raised her finger to her lips. She seemed to grow stronger by the second, feeding on her relief and his despair.

She said, “It is very difficult. The war.”

He said, “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

“I understand.”

He looked at her with incredulous eyes, then took up his clothes and dressed hurriedly behind the screen.