My Dear I Wanted to Tell You by Louisa Young Page A

was he, and that was it: a system.
    He was sitting one morning early, waiting for the dixie containing breakfast to come down the line, a silvery blueshot dawn, a day that, he realised, would be as limpid as the one a year ago, God, was it a year ago , if you looked up, not out, and just saw the blue sky, and the birds flying across it as if nothing was happening, if you blocked out all the rest . . .
    Purefoy kept throwing; kept throwing. He threw for weeks, for months. At some stage he was given proper grenades and a helmet, though they all learnt to piss on a handkerchief to breathe through long before gas masks came around. One night he saw Captain Harper flying across the sky like a whirling starfish before shattering into a flaming shell crater, and he put the sight in that special part of his brain he would never go to again, fed it through the greedy slot in the forever unopenable door. His thoughts jumped like fleas, like drops of water on a hotplate, uncatchable, inexplicable.
    The new CO was a Captain Locke, tall and pale with a swooping body, like a heron’s, and a nose like an eagle’s beak. His long thin legs crossed round and round themselves when he sat; Purefoy could tell that out of uniform he would wear tweeds, and they would flap around his long ankles.
    With him, in the summer, they were moved along the line, south towards the River Somme. Their new trench system extended out of the cellar of what had been a handsome old stone farmhouse, where beautiful wallpaper hung, sooted and flapping, from the last shards of upright wall. The cellar had been dug out for the officers, and someone had put a piano down there.
    ‘Anyone play at all?’ asked Locke, hopefully, sticking his head out.
    Ainsworth, it turned out, had played the organ at Wigan Parish Church. He hesitantly entered the officers’ glamorous cave, and smiled a little at the sight of the piano. ‘Little rusty,’ he murmured, but when he sat down an air of authority arose from him, and when he sang, a beautiful, manly rendition of an aria from a Bach cantata, silence dropped like blossoms, churchlike. Locke closed his eyes. Riley could only suppose everyone was feeling the same lurch of loss and love and beauty and alienation from everything that they were losing hold of by the very acts of trying to protect it.
    ‘Ain’t that German?’ said Burgess, when Ainsworth had finished.
    ‘Well spotted, soldier,’ said Locke. ‘However, it is Bach, and Bach was a citizen of heaven sent down to enlighten and delight men of all nations. The Kaiser has no monopoly on the genius of his country’s sons.’
    ‘What’s the name of the piece?’ Purefoy asked. ‘“ Ich habe genug ”,’ said Ainsworth.
    Locke barked with laughter. ‘Which means,’ he said cheerfully, ‘“I have had enough.” More or less. Ainsworth, thank you, that was splendid. The rest of you, lads, back to work. Er – you – stay and give me a hand with this . . .’
    ‘You’ was Purefoy. ‘This’ was Captain Locke’s gramophone, which needed unpacking and setting up.
    ‘You know what Comrade Lenin says, sir?’ said Purefoy, as they attached the horn.
    ‘Comrade Lenin!’ exclaimed Locke. ‘Good Lord, man, what do you know about Lenin?’
    ‘Not a lot, sir,’ said Purefoy, mildly.
    ‘Are you a Communist, Private?’
    ‘Would I tell you if I was, sir?’ said Purefoy. It popped out. Locke gave him a look. It struck Purefoy because it was a human look in a military world, and it was those looks, those flashes of the other reality, which kept him alive even as they made him want to weep. He desperately wanted them, but he had to avoid them. Bowells, for example. He couldn’t look Bowells in the eye any more. It was too naked and pathetic.
    ‘So, what does Lenin say?’ asked Locke.
    Purefoy grinned. ‘Along the lines of music softens the heart and brain, sir, and disinclines a man from his purpose . . .’ Robert Waveney had quoted this to his wife one