The Apple-Tree Throne Read online

  Here, this was his chaise-longue, upon whose green velvet his long elegant body has left a long elegant dint; this was his bed, whose mattress Vic insists upon flipping, then replacing the linens so that they no longer smell of him; this was his writing-desk, emptied of all his effects and still bearing a lighter spot on the mahogany where his wrist would have rested to work. “You can get that right out with a raw walnut,” Vic says confidently, and makes a note in her pocketbook. His wardrobe is blessedly empty, smelling of cedar-rounds, and we hang my meager clothing inside, the threadbare civvies next to the crisp new uniforms. I am relieved when we shut and lock the door. It brings down the image of the place.

  “Here, you’ve gone up in the world,” Clark says after we’ve finished and have installed ourselves in the empty kitchen, for the servants will not start till tomorrow. “No eating doves and lizards any more, my lad.”

  “Oh dear, I do hope you haven’t told your young lady those stories,” I tell him, as Vic rolls her eyes at us.

  “With the greatest relish!” he announces. “Indeed, a bit of relish would have gone down nicely with our vittles, eh Braddock?”

  I smile weakly. Near the end, we had all grown so hungry from the regular but mean rations that some men had resorted to trapping local birds; for a share of the stew I plucked and dressed them, as the only man jack among them that had done it as a lad. I loathed the gamey flavour of those verminous pigeons and crows, but ate all the same. We ate horse, too, whenever one went down and could not be saved. The Frenchmen and Goths, who ate it at home, never complained; and Clark told me he once saw one of them hamstringing a horse in the night to improve the next day’s rations. That was officially sabotage and he could have been shot, but we were all too tired to care by that point. Which reminds me:

  “Wickersley never ate that stuff,” I say. “He holed up in his tent and crunched up on hardtack like a very Ahab. And he used to dress us down for joking about Nibbles, remember?”

  “You’re right, he did!” Clark cries. “Probably because he’d done his share of it before we went overseas. You know how those career army types are.”

  “Clarify for me, gentlemen,” Vic says. “Who was ‘Nibbles’?”

  “Oh, that was a nickname for one of the older lads in our division,” I tell her. “Short for ‘Can-nibble,’ as he used to be a navy-man, and he — “

  “Almost definitely et people at sea, and that’s why he requested transfer to the army,” Clark says. “And Wickersley never laughed, because he — “

  “Why, undeniably. A sure sign of an anthropophage if ever I heard one,” I say, shaking my head.

  “You two,” Vic says affectionately, “are disgusting. Strange meat indeed. How can you speak so ill of the dead?”

  And we laugh uncomfortably, because she is well aware that we loved him, but she was not there in the battlefield with us, where all we could do was speak ill of each other to survive. Laughter was better than bread, we used to say; it could be shared infinitely amongst the squad, and it did not have weevils in it.

  But it seems less funny now.

  At dusk I stroll the grounds around my new domicile, the thick green turf not yet tipped with frost, the black iron gates wickedly spiked, fresh glass on the garden walls. I cannot shake the feeling that I am staying at a hotel and will soon be ejected at high-speed for failure to pay; I too clearly remember the hungry year before the draft, when it seemed that I never ran but for being chased, when the crafty, childish joy of scraping a living and priding myself on my resourcefulness ran out and it was all stomach-music and unshaven cheeks, when I thought I might have to become a sandwich-man to survive, mocked by all.

  Wickersley, who disdained the various ways we stretched our army grub, had never felt that, but I find I cannot begrudge him this; his family are good people, and their good deed will preserve what is left of my saved pay packets, like the ant in the story preparing for winter. I have never been quite comfortable being a grass-hopper.

  A deepening lilac sky burns above the grey stone of the walls, stars glinting in mimicry of the glass-topped bricks. Here in the lawn I can barely see the electric street-lights of the town. I am sure I can see them from my room, though, and this turns out to be true.

  He does not come the first night, nor the second. The third, I awaken at the tapping, assume I am dreaming, and return to bed.

  On the seventh night, we stare at each other for minute after minute, and I finally go and light a candle and bring it back to the window. I hope to discover that it is some optical illusion caused by a trick of the curtains and the glass, but he is still there. The torn throat where Captain Eleutherios’ great curved knife emptied out his life, the London-smoky khakis soaked in darkness from neck to knee, his face twisted in pain and fear. I can see through him to both moon and stars.

  Well. If I am not asleep, and am not mad, then this is indeed a spiritual visitation, and I suppose he is not unjustified, as I have had the audacity to move in here in the first place, and in the second have had dinner once more with Miss Meyers since then. It is not, I wish to reassure him, that I am trying to or would even like to take his place. His place is his place. I am trying to make one of my own, slowly and with difficulty, because I am tired all the time, I hurt all the time, there is no place I can make my own, not right now. But none of this is said.

  His ghostly hand extends, and the knuckle meets the glass, with the faintest of tapping sounds. There is a wide smear of transparent blood on the back of his hand, perhaps where he brought it up in a futile attempt to forestall the bite of the blade. And yet, to be brutally precise, having one’s throat cut is a war-time death for which many of those now dead would fervently pray. There are many, many worse fates. The men he led into that retreat would have begged for a slit throat, and perhaps some of them did.

  “I am sorry, sir,” I murmur, and pull the curtains shut.

  ***

  Clark takes me to dinner at The Maharajah on Murkwell Street, and stabs me with his fork till I eventually eat.

  “I declare that I don’t understand you at all any more, Braddock,” he says equably, putting away his double portion of fish curry and potatoes, which gradually dyes his light-brown moustache a tarty shade of brass. “I once saw you knock a man out for trying to take one of your samosas. Eat!”

  “I’m doing my best, Grandmother Goose,” I tell him. I am, truth be told, annoyed that he’s noticed anything amiss; I thought I had been hiding my condition somewhat better than, it seems, I actually am. The pain in my leg exhausts me and reduces my appetite, drives the Sand-man from my door, and Wickersley’s bloody ghost badgers me almost every night, tapping on the window and telling me to get out, and it is just enough to rouse me from my infuriatingly light slumber.

  Last night he even managed a high-pitched ghostly wail, and I therefore slept not one minute all night; I found myself quite literally haunted by the sadness and despair and pain in the cry. I have asked him to go away. I have asked him to go haunt the cemetery. I have asked him whether a priest would help. He cries out softly in response to my entreaties and taps on the window. Dash, dash, dash, dot; dash, dash, dash, dot. At least he seems unable to get into the room.

  “Let’s get a Clark’s Garden in you,” Clark says, and gestures to the waiter, ignoring my groan. This is a beverage of his own design, comprised of rosewater and orangeblossom, as well as quantities of lemon juice, salt, black rum, and strong, carbonated ginger beer. It is not dissimilar to drinking a flask of cheap perfume, and God help you if you should spill it upon your shirt; you end up smelling like, not to put too fine a point upon it, Shipton Road. They mock him here when he orders it, which he accepts with perfect equanimity; the staff know us from old, and we cannot but keep returning, for the victuals are plentiful and cheap. I suppose we are not quite so destitute as the old days, but we have three years’ blood and mud to thank for that, and a wide and varied collection of scars and wounds. Even as I think
this, my leg twinges and I feel all the blood drain from my face. Clark appears to not notice, as he stirs his bubbling cauldron of booze with the end of his knife.

  “We haven’t seen you for weeks,” he says, pushing his plate towards me; I listlessly spear a piece of potato and try to convince myself I can taste it. “Vic misses you. Do come to dinner this Sunday. She’s making a roast as big around as your thigh, and a walnut cake.”

  “Thank you, Bill.” He knows as well as I do that I’ve nowhere else to be and nothing else to be doing. I’m grateful that he stops by as often as he does, trying to divert me. He is not aware that he’s diverting me not merely from the pain and fatigue, but the more generic lassitude that has plagued me since our return, to say nothing of my nocturnal harasser. “I say, don’t mind me asking, but you… do you…believe in…”

  “A reasonable rate of return? Yes.”

  “No — “

  “That redheads are inevitably trouble? Yes.”

  “Well, yes, but in — “

  “That the ladies at the next table are looking at you with disreputable intention?”

  “Are they? Oh dear, there’s no accounting for taste.” I shake my head. “In ghosts.”

  “You mean the… white sheets, floating through graveyards, going Oooooo at midnight, old women crossing ‘emselves and whispering about fetches…that type of ghost?”

  “Any type of ghost,” I say, irritated. “Yes, those ones too, I suppose.”

  “Ben, for heaven’s sake,” he laughs, gulping down his Garden. “We’re at the end of the century, old man— heading into a new one all bright-eyed and clear-headed on the wings of science and technology. And if we’re forging ahead, we’re certainly leaving such silly superstitions well in the past. Come now— you didn’t grow up believing that witches lived in the brambles in Farmer Sorley’s field, or that they changed themselves to bats during the day-time, nor that pebbles with holes in them would let you see fairy-folk, or that an oak-gall in the cradle cures colic…”

  “No…no, of course not. And anyway, the new century starts at the one, not the nought.”

  “Nonsense. What’s the nought, then?”

  “That’s the last year of this century.”

  “Very well, Professor Braddock; but either way, ghosts do not belong here, mucking up our science with their robes and chains. Where did that come from, at any rate?”

  “Just…thinking.” I poke at my plate of rice and sauce, from which I have been repeatedly entreatied to consume at least the meat and greens, and stir it around to make it look as if I’ve eaten more of it. I feel the gaze of the table of women on the back of my neck, and realize they must be staring at Clark, who’s one of those dashingly burly types with broad shoulders and a military swagger, like a recruiting poster. Next to him, although we’re almost the same height, I feel weedy and inadequate, too blond and milk-pink by half. I’m not on his poster; mine must be for face-cream or powder. What does it matter anyway? Miss Meyers has set her cap upon me, hasn’t she? I wonder what she would say if I told her about my ghost. She does not strike me as a screamer or fainter.

  “Well,” Clark says quietly after a moment. “You know, we did see almost a thousand men killed in front of us in cold blood, didn’t we? Slaughtered, like animals, not even murdered like men. That weren’t like nothing I’d seen in three years over there. That’s no way for a man to die. And we all watched. Us few who was ransomed by the General’s death.”

  “That was no way for a man to die either,” I say, “but it was better than theirs, I think.”

  “I suppose so. Quick, at least.” He sighs, and gestures at my drink; I obediently swallow a few mouthfuls of the soap-tasting elixir. “Sometimes I feel it made us…well, unfit in some way for life back here, do you ever feel that? We’ve seen too much. No one else here has seen anything like that.”

  “Yes. Even if they worked at a…a stockyard, or a gaol, or anything else that turns the living into the dead, they haven’t seen what we’ve seen.”

  “Strange to come back to someplace without enemies,” he says.

  “Do you think that’s what we’ve come back to?” I say, surprised. “Why, there are villains everywhere you look. There’s always something to fight against.”

  “No, I think it’s less clear-cut than that now; there are no fronts, it’s not a side and then another side. The good and the evil. Whatever we’re fighting… no, we’ve left all that behind.”

  “Wickersley didn’t,” I say quietly, thinking of the ghost. “He’s still at war.”

  “Stop thinking about him, Ben.” Clark falls silent, turning his drink in his hand. “What will you do now, my lad?”

  “I’m all right for brass, if that’s what you’re asking.” I laugh shortly, ignoring the pain in my thigh. “And the Wickersleys have offered to find me a position in one of their offices when my final papers come and I’m allowed to work again.”

  “There’s still good people in the world,” he says, pleased. “And the leg?”

  I open my mouth, and close it. I want nothing more than to tell him how it screams and howls sometimes, and sometimes is as silent and obedient as its twin. I want to tell him how when it is rainy or foreboding I wake in the middle of the night muffling screams into my pillows, how the pain comes in low like a wave and then washes over me, as if my entire body is lifted by it. I want to tell him that somehow, in the midst of it all, I can still grimly laugh that the servants only come twice a day and I am alone at night, though perhaps when the general occupied those rooms there was nighttime noise for more pleasant reasons, and the extremity of my distress probably cannot be audibly distinguished from the extremity of delight. I want to tell him I can’t eat, I can’t sleep, that the X-pictures show a leg as perfectly repaired and sturdy as this legendary roast that Victoria will cook for us. I want to tell him that they put me under gas twice, and all the shrapnel is gone, not a speck of brass or glass or stone or bone remaining, the stitches gone, the femur as flawless as a white porcelain replica of itself. I want to tell him there is no rhyme or reason for this pain, and yet it is always with me, sometimes asleep, sometimes awake, like a large dangerous animal I have been forced to host in my rooms.

  Instead, I say, “Oh, still settling. Some days are better than others.”

  His eyes — wide, blue, knowing — meet mine. After a moment he simply says, “Let’s get some cheesy chapattis wrapped up, and find a steam station. It’s getting late.”

  “Capital idea, old man. Midnight snack.”

  We sip the diluted remnants of our drinks, nudging the star-shaped pieces of ice aside — there’s ice in everything now, what on earth have the scientists been doing while we’ve been away? — and wait for the waiter to return with our bundles. Clark got extra cheese in his: that’ll be for Vic, who likes anything even resembling bread and cheese. Sandwiches, buns, scones, cakes. She puts Red Les on her apple tart, I remember suddenly. Silly, lovely thing. She and I were friends in school long before either of us met Bill, and when they took up together I was so pleased that I accepted it as proof of divine intervention. Cupid, anyway. I stood up for them at their wedding, and after the register was signed the three of us killed about five bottles of claret; we had to fish her drunken husband out of the shallow, stinking canal not twenty yards from their new house. Quite ruined his wedding-suit, but as he pointed out, you only wear it once.

  “Excuse me, sars?”

  I turn, and the table of young ladies titters briefly at us, because we are being approached by a small pack — herd? flock? — of ladies of more distinguished age, their bearing that particularly English type of beamingly self-righteous, each bracing the other in some way that we men can but dimly comprehend. Their leader smiles and thrusts a brown paper package at me that separates into two as I accept it; I hand the other to Clark. “We just wanted to thank you brave young lads for your service,” she says. “We seen everything on the viz, and gretly admi
red your bravery in the face of…”

  “Insurmountable odds,” someone prompts her from the back of the gaggle.

  She nods briskly. “Keepin’ us safe from those criminals overseas, is all. The country needed you, and you shewed no fear, but lifted your instruments o’ death and proceeded unhesitatin’ly towards the cowardly foe.”

  I am tongue-tied in the face of this, but Clark rallies magnificently and delivers a speech about how all of our sacrifices and hardship have been redeemed by this, the simple gratitude of these noble stanchions of GRoB, who of course formed the indomitable backbone of the home front whilst the far less important ‘combat’ raged overseas. They nod in satisfaction and leave the restaurant, and then Ravi comes by with our take-away, and we fumble brown paper and string as we pay and walk out into the fog.

  Clark opens the wrong one first, and laughs as he re-ties it and opens the one we’ve been given by our admirers. “Oh, I’ll be baked with currants. Such riches!”

  We have to stop and lean against a lamp-post to laugh, for we have been blessed with two mufflers of prodigious length, knit from such a rag-tag assortment of colours that I am sure some of the lengths were picked from the lint-basket. “A right pair of harlequins!”

  “We should charge admission!” he gasps, and sweeps mine around my face; it smells of lanolin and woodsmoke. “There, and never mind the winter’s cruel blast, eh?”

  “Winter’s cruel bite, isn’t it? I’d no idea we returned from Mediterranean shores to the actual North Pole,” I tell him, peeking through the thick wool. “Fancy.”

  We part fondly at the tram station, for I am headed north to The Heights and he is off to their cosy house in Swindmore Street, and my muffler and I return home.

  I put my paper packet of chapattis in the coldbox, then open the door once more just to put my hand inside and marvel at the temperature. We did not have one when I was growing up, and I think I saw my first one just a few months before we were shipped off to war. And just three years later they are as common as a tea-kettle. Science is moving at a gallop, whilst the rest of us are at a lazy trot. Clark is right. The past needs to be viewed in its appropriate perspective, and we must focus all our hope and energy on the future.