And now she was on this boat, not unaware of what they were sailing towards, not away from a war, no, on the contrary, but her thoughts were full of the surf crashing on the Cape rocks, its almost frenzied energy, as handfuls of gulls were thrown into the moist air.
In the train through the British countryside she concentrates her mind to focus on recent events. She forces herself to retrace her steps, she believes in the value of being present in the moment, of not going through life blinkered.
She was on the mailboat, she had stood there in the embrace of an overcoat. The boat was nosing through a grey sea and grey sky, and that was portentous, because that boat, along with her, was bound for another, deeper darkness.
It had not fully dawned on her yet. In the Netherlands they live shielded from real violence. But on that boat … so ashen, as if everything had already been drained of life.
The deck was full of grey soldiers scurrying like ants, and if they’d come to a standstill, she now suspects, fear would have found a foothold. She had tried to imagine what they were up against, what the battlefield would look like, and what the men would be doing there. Looking at them, she tried to place one of the faces in a trench, a pale man with the sharply pointed nose and the bobbing head of a seagull. But she couldn’t. Strangely enough, she could only visualise him lying with his back propped up against an anthill – yes, an anthill of all things! – with a long thin cigarette in his mouth and the smoke curling lazily upwards.
She tries to imagine the fear, the horror, but the closest she can get is the pale vacant face of her friend Jacques before he left again for the front. When she tries to picture the war, she thinks of Jacques. Jacques la Mer, her friend from Dordrecht, a teacher set on becoming a soldier because his country, France, needed him. She’d once grabbed his hand as if to shake him awake, pushing his hand against her chest, but …
There is something upsetting and utterly unfathomable in that scene: Jacques’s hand against her chest. His hand under hers. Her heart beating wildly. His face stiffening, his lips slightly apart as if he wanted to say something. His hand slipping slowly from hers and falling back into his lap.
She sees her eyes faintly mirrored in the train window. And behind the darkened sockets of her eyes, behind the dull reflection of her high forehead, her ash-blonde hair curling away and cascading down her cheek to her neck, she’s aware of a sense of relief, a landscape that, unlike the Netherlands, if only because of the tilting horizon, its rise and fall, asks for attention. But she cannot quite look beyond her reflection, and it seems as if something skittish sporadically appears next to her mirrored image. Every now and then she glances to the side, but there is no one there.
This journey has me totally beside myself, she thinks. Why? I am here just to do my work. It’s not as if I’m bound for the trenches.
She thinks again of Jacques; of the soldiers she’s seen on the mailboat. She’d squeezed past one of them to get to the deck; it was actually a rather comical tussle as both of them tried to get through a door at the same time. For a moment they were pressed up against each other in the doorframe, its sharp edge covered in flaking paint and the black metal showing underneath. She recalls it as sharply as if it were happening now: her coat brushing against his uniform, and she looking past his face and seeing the peeling metal next to his ear, and they said nothing, trying only to extricate themselves as quickly as possible from a wholly unforeseen, totally uncalled for intimacy. Yet her body seems to shudder again from the shock of the soldier’s body against hers, the uniform with its leather straps and clasps, the rough material and the hard metal, and below it the white, shuddering flesh, the smell of a bag filled with warm grain. After their bodies were freed from each other she’d taken a step back into the damp air, stood still, startled, not because of the unsolicited contact, quite the opposite, but why exactly, she could not say either.
That was also not the end of the bizarre dance – now the thought of a last waltz comes to her – it was just a prelude to something else, to something, yes, what should she call it, something far more sombre.
Up on deck, a group of people had huddled together against the railing, shouting and gesturing. She went and stood with them, next to all those men with their darting eyes, and looked at where they were gesturing into the fog, as if there were a fleck of colour visible somewhere. The mailboat sounded its horn, and then she saw it too: a ship looming from the mist, lifeless, lopsided in the water, unmistakably a wreck that might sink at any moment. The ship yawed in the water, rocking slowly in the swell, creaking, forlorn, metal plates peeling away from the bow, masts, smokestacks and cannons in rigor mortis. Everyone was transfixed. It was a ghost ship. She carefully turned her head, all the faces around her were petrified: it was indeed a phantasm driven towards them by the wind.
She pushed through the bodies to the railing, watching hypnotised as the ship receded into the gloom. What on earth was it? What was that thing that appeared and then simply disappeared again? She looked around for someone to talk to, someone she might ask, but everyone suddenly seemed occupied with matters that could not be interrupted except on pain of death. She was faced with a wall of grey backs.
That is what this war is, she thought, a phantom in the mist, nothing more. It is not my war. Nothing here can take anything away from me. I am alive, and my role is to ensure that life triumphs. That is why I came here. But the image of the ghost ship stays with her, and oddly enough it does not upset her.
When the train entered Newton Abbot station, she felt that she could still hear the ship in the mist – a sound like the plonggg of cut barbed wire in recoil, she could hear it on the deck of that dying ship, the sound echoes and echoes and echoes. And she is reminded of the soldier she had brushed up against, his soft, yielding body, and the sharp metal that must have dug into his back, and she wondered, as the train lurched to a standstill, whether that dance with the soldier would be the closest she would get to the war.
She is one of two women disembarking here, and up ahead she sees a young man in uniform, probably one of the hospital orderlies, stopping the other woman, who shakes her head and looks away. The man laughs ruefully, sees her, raises an arm expectantly as he strides towards her.
She walks towards him holding her hand out in greeting. But just before their hands meet, this being her first time on British soil, she becomes self-conscious about her accent. To him it should sound Dutch enough, she thinks, and her English is possibly better than that of most Dutchmen.
He listens to her, forlorn, as if he needs to make an effort to hear her above the din in the station, and then takes her largest suitcase. Jacobs is his name, private Patrick Jacobs, with large front teeth, the cause, perhaps, of his decidedly nasal tone.
Jacobs walks ahead through the exit. In the street in front of the station, under the soft, low skies, he turns to her and sweeps his arm in an arc as if he were sowing oats, and there it stands, like a giant metal spider: a motorbike with a sidecar.
She comes to an abrupt halt, sets her little suitcase down by her feet – or rather, drops it. It is inappropriate, she thinks, to react so spontaneously to the situation, but she nevertheless looks at the soldier with a smile. It is a Douglas. Yes, look, there is the name. Jacques had one of these, though without the sidecar. Such a pest, following her abroad like this. She steps forward and draws a finger across the cool round lid of the sleek petrol tank, takes hold of a cable on the handlebars, slides her thumb and finger across to … ah, the clutch! Jacques was oh so proud of his clutch, one of the very first. She