Authors: Deborah Challinor
White Feathers (21 page)
Owen watched in horror as both horses floundered then sank rapidly out of sight. Beside him he could hear Trevor screaming, ‘
Give us a fucking rope
!’ and had to grab him by the collar to stop him jumping in.
‘
No
!’ he shrieked only inches from Trevor’s stricken face, the heat of his own rage and shock almost overwhelming him. ‘He’s gone!’
When Trevor bellowed, ‘
He has not
!’ Owen delivered a punch that knocked him to the ground.
Then he helped Trevor to his feet again and they stood together, scrutinising the crater in rigid silence, but after nearly twenty minutes all that could be seen were several languid air bubbles which plopped obscenely on the scummy surface.
Kenmore, October 1916
A
ndrew risked a glance at Tamar, sitting next to him on the unyielding church pew, rigid and silent, cocooned in her anger and the darkness of her grief. And it was a risk, because to see her like this hurt him almost as much as the death of his beloved youngest son. Her lips were clamped shut, holding in her pain, and for the first time she was looking her age.
Behind them the small church was packed, with still more standing outside in respectful silence, and he felt a numb gratitude towards everyone who had come to mourn his son’s death, even though he’d never even met some of them. Lachie, Jeannie and Lucy, holding an uncharacteristically still Duncan, sat on their left while Joseph, his face blank with his own suffering, sat on their right.
Reverend McKenzie had almost finished the memorial service, the hymns had been sung and soon they would shuffle out into the bright spring sunshine, having, in theory any way, laid their memories of Ian to rest. But Andrew could,
would
, never do that, because to deliberately tidy up and pack away such a vibrant young life would be the greatest tragedy of all, a clear victory for the insidious, thieving
thing
that everyone so blithely referred to as ‘the war’.
Outside, Kepa approached them, shook Andrew’s hand and hugged Tamar briefly. ‘I am so sorry,’ he said. ‘Joseph was bad enough, but this is, this is …’ He tailed off.
Tamar nodded and Andrew said simply, ‘Thank you, Kepa. We appreciate you coming.’
He meant it, but he had seen the deep, heartfelt compassion in the other man’s eyes when he had embraced Tamar, and it pricked at him because he wanted to be the one to offer his wife the comfort she needed, not this annoyingly good-looking, fit, apparently ageless Maori man who had once been her lover. He knew he was being petty and foolish, but he couldn’t help it; emotionally flayed, he lacked the strength to suppress all the mean little doubts and fears he’d so successfully kept at bay over the years.
‘How is Parehuia?’ he added, to ease the noticeable tension.
Kepa’s wife had had a serious heart attack several months ago and was now more or less confined to her home, where she sat and continued to eat excessively in flagrant defiance of her doctor’s warnings.
‘She is not a well woman,’ Kepa replied, and left it at that.
He thought Parehuia was eating herself to death, and they had argued bitterly about it, but she refused to change her habits, insisting that if she was destined to die soon, as certainly appeared to be the case, she intended to do it with a cake fork in her hand.
Andrew invited everyone at the church back to Kenmore for refreshments, although he knew Tamar would rather they all stayed away so she could shut herself in their room and mourn alone. But it was the socially expected thing to do, and Mrs Heath had gone to great lengths to prepare a fitting repast. Almost everyone accepted his invitation, and for an hour or so the house was crowded with friends and neighbours doing their best to console, but after they’d gone the rooms felt bereft and somehow cold, despite the sunshine streaming through the open doors and windows.
At breakfast the following morning Tamar looked up un
interestedly when Mrs Heath came into the dining room and stood twisting her hands in her apron, always a sign that something was upsetting her.
‘Is anything wrong?’ Andrew asked shortly.
The housekeeper nodded and frowned, then replied, ‘There’s something in the kitchen garden.’
‘Yes?’ Andrew prompted, irritated. Perhaps the house cow had got out again, and frankly he couldn’t see why Mrs Heath couldn’t shoo the bloody thing away herself.
‘It’s a baby,’ Mrs Heath blurted, as if she couldn’t quite believe the words coming out of her own mouth. ‘Wrapped up in a box.’
Andrew and Tamar stared at her.
‘What?’ said Andrew.
‘A baby. In a box.’
They hurried outside to find that there was indeed an infant, in a wooden crate nestled among the bean poles directly opposite the back door where it couldn’t fail to be spotted by anyone coming down the steps. They gazed down at it in silence, turning only when Jeannie came out to see what the fuss was about.
The baby looked calmly back at them, apparently comfortable and contented, snug under a tightly tucked blanket. It was wearing a yellow knitted bonnet and matching mittens, one of which had almost fallen off.
Tamar bent down; there was a folded note tucked into the box. She opened it and silently read the few lines of neat writing.
Dear Mr and Mrs Murdoch
I was at Ian’s memorial service yesterday. This is his child. His name is Liam and he was born on the 4th of July.
I cannot look after him. I was hoping you would be able to. He deserves a real home.
Thank you.
The note was unsigned.
Tamar’s mouth opened and then closed. She looked at the infant, then at the note again, and finally turned to Andrew. ‘It says this is Ian’s son!’
Andrew read it himself, then turned the paper over looking for clues regarding who might have written it. He said, almost to himself, ‘Ian’s son.’
Jeannie crouched, untucked the blanket and lifted the baby out; he gurgled complacently as she laid him against her shoulder and patted his back gently.
‘Take his bonnet off,’ she suggested.
Tamar untied the ribbons under the child’s chubby chin and removed the hat. Then she gasped and blinked back instant, hot tears, because the child really was the image of Ian as a baby. He had soft curls, almost white, that feathered up from his small head, bright blue eyes and dimpled cheeks. He was beautiful.
Andrew said, ‘What are those things in the box?’
Under the blanket were folded a dozen clean nappies, two more knitted baby costumes and two cotton smocks. Tamar retrieved the bundle and touched the tiny garments wordlessly.
Lucy came out then, carrying Duncan. She stopped when she saw the infant in Jeannie’s arms. ‘Whose is that?’ she asked in amazement.
Andrew handed her the note.
She read it and said, ‘Is it really? Ian’s, I mean?’
Tamar said ‘Yes’ at the same time that Andrew said ‘We don’t know.’
‘Oh Andrew,’ Tamar responded crossly. ‘Of course he’s Ian’s.
Look
at him!’
Then a very determined look crossed her face and she rushed inside, appearing again a minute later with a photograph taken of Ian a few months after his birth. The sepia tones had been hand-
painted to enhance the image, but the resemblance between the child in the picture and the baby Jeannie held was extreme.
‘See?’ Tamar exclaimed triumphantly. ‘They’re exactly the same. Who else’s baby could it be?’
Andrew closed his eyes briefly as Tamar took the child from Jeannie and settled him in the crook of her arm. He said gently, not wanting to hurt her, ‘There isn’t any proof, dear. This baby could be anyone’s.’
But even he could see a remarkable similarity in the features that reminded him so painfully of those of his youngest son.
‘Sometimes, Andrew, for such a clever man you can be very obtuse,’ Tamar responded, not taking her eyes off the baby. ‘He belongs here,’ she added with an ominous note of finality.
‘But darling, we can’t keep him. He’s not a puppy, for God’s sake!’
But Tamar had already turned and marched up the steps by then, and her deliberate slamming of the back door cut him off.
France, 1916
James was also thinking about Ian, although he usually tried not to do because it distressed him so much. But then so many things did, lately. He told himself he’d come to terms with the death of his youngest brother, but he still felt sick and angry whenever he thought about the utter stupidity and waste of it. As he stared unseeingly at his boots, a thin, nasal voice interrupted his thoughts.
‘If you don’t mind, Captain Murdoch, your attention would be appreciated. We wouldn’t want your men to die just because you’d nodded off during a briefing, would we?’
Sarcastic little prick, James thought, raising his eyes to meet those of the speaker.
Major Lydon was a short, round, odious man with a colossal ego who fancied himself a close confidant of the New Zealand Division’s commander, Major-General Russell, although they’d probably only ever met once or twice, if that. Lydon commanded James’s company and was universally despised for his pomposity, his arrogance and his general military ineptitude. At the moment he was whacking a large map with a stick to underline his instructions regarding tomorrow’s battle orders. James let his eyes glaze over, although he was in fact listening; later he and the others would talk through the orders and, if possible, reinterpret them in a manner that would still perhaps achieve the desired outcome but minimise the number of men they would lose.
They were still on the Somme. Although only a matter of weeks had passed since the division had marched into the valley, it felt as if they’d been there forever and they were beginning to wonder if they’d ever leave the wretched place. It was still only early October, and already more than 1000 New Zealanders had been killed. The British and French had fared even worse; it was rumoured that their casualty lists numbered in the hundreds of thousands. The Germans kept coming, the Allies kept counter-attacking, a yard would be gained here, two lost there, and all the while men were being maimed, or killed, or just disappearing, buried forever under tons of putrid French mud.
James idly surveyed Major Lydon’s spacious, heavily sandbagged dugout. In one corner there was a bed, a
real
bed, piled with pillows and a comforter, in another was an antique desk and in front of the currently assembled officers was a solid mahogany table on which Lydon dined and from behind which he held court during briefings. There were rugs on the floor, which Lydon’s long-suffering batman was ordered to take outside and scrape and shake every morning, and on the wall a framed, badly executed portrait of a harried-looking woman everyone assumed was Lydon’s poor
wife. Over the past weeks James had been tempted many times by an extremely infantile urge to sneak in one night and draw a pair of spectacles and a moustache on it, but it would be the end of his army career should he be caught, although the chaps would all think it hysterically funny. These days they all laughed madly at situations and sights that would not have been considered even remotely amusing at home.
In his silly pseudo-British accent, the major was droning to a halt.
‘Now, gentlemen, I know you’re all feeling somewhat jaded, but things really are on the up and up and it’s just a matter of keeping one’s chin up, and of course honour and glory in one’s sights. Dismissed.’
They filed out. ‘Jaded?’ James muttered to his friend and fellow captain, Ben Harper. ‘Fucking
jaded
?’
‘Ignore it, James,’ said Ben, a tall young man with a shock of brown hair that flopped constantly over his forehead. ‘He says it at the end of every briefing; you know it doesn’t mean anything.’
James snorted in disgust. ‘It’s not as if he gets out there and does anything himself, the windy little stoat.’
It was common knowledge that Major Lydon rarely got his own highly polished boots dirty, preferring instead to spend most of his time in his dugout issuing orders and criticising the performances of his junior officers. Everyone, however, assumed he was getting away with it as he hadn’t been ‘moved on’ yet, which is what happened to at least some of the more inadequate officers who suddenly found themselves counting tins of bully beef back at the New Zealand base in Étaples.
Ben patted James placatingly on the shoulder, noting his friend’s impatience with a slight frown.
‘Don’t worry about it,’ he soothed. ‘We’ll get together later, shall we, and have a drink?’
Many of the officers drank in the privacy of their dugouts, and for all but the teetotallers it was the tacitly accepted method of relaxing. The enlisted men would have done the same if they could have got their hands on alcohol. Usually, their drinking was confined to the generous tot of rum issued before each scheduled attack.
James set off along the zigzagging, multi-branched trench system to check on his men and give them a quick rundown on what would be happening tomorrow. He found a group of them resting in a wide traverse; a handful were smoking and singing while others, oblivious to the noise, were asleep on the ground with their greatcoats over their heads. He allowed himself a smile as he listened to the latest song doing the rounds, and reflected that there’d be hell to pay if Lydon heard the men singing it:
We’re bombed on the left and we’re bombed on the right,
We’re shelled all the day and we’re shelled all the night,
And if something don’t happen and that mighty soon,
There’ll be nobody left in the fucking platoon!
In some ways James wished he hadn’t been promoted to captain, since it alienated him to some extent from his men; he cared for them deeply, and perhaps somewhat to his own detriment, he suspected. He frequently wrote letters home on behalf of the illiterate ones, and his advice was often sought concerning wayward wives or the prospect of children who would not know fathers returning from the war. How would he know? He would be one himself.