The Shell House Read Online Free Page B

interruption of the war—if he survived, as everyone seemed oddly confident that he would. To his father and the vicar, it was as if the British army had merely been awaiting the return of Lieutenant Edmund Pearson before sweeping on to victory.
    The maid, the pretty one, brought more hot water in a shining silver pot. She bobbed a curtsey as she placed the pot on the table, which already bore a ridiculous amount of bone china, linen and silverware just for three people to have scones and cream and a cup of tea. In France, in the front line, there would be a battered tin mug and strong tea tainted with petrol from the cans the water had been carried in. Edmund would have preferred that. Home, with all its comforts and routines, seemed abnormally normal, shockingly familiar.
    Edmund, with his father and the vicar, was sitting out on the terrace, supposedly enjoying the fine midsummer weather which was gracing his last week of convalescent leave. Their chairs faced the balustrade, so that they could gaze over the gardens and out to the fields and forest. Since the gardeners had enlisted—all but Baillie and his remaining son, the dull-witted one, who kept order as best they could—the gardens were less manicured than usual. June growth flourished all the more for the comparative neglect, with buttercups and campions daring to show their blooms alongside the choicer plants. Beyond the ha-ha, acres of Essex countryside spread themselves in the patterns so familiar to Edmund from the framed estate map that hung in his father’s study: fields of wheat and barley, copses, grazing land. Beyond, to the south and west, the farthest reaches of Epping Forest were hazed in fresh green.
    It was for this he was fighting, Edmund told himself. If the German army had its way it would sweep on over the Channel and across the English coast. He imagined these fields—his own fields—sliced up into trenches, bristling with barbed wire and pitted with shell-holes, like the front lines in France and Belgium. England had entered the war to support the Belgians; but to Edmund, future landowner, it was the land itself that was the victim, hacked and mutilated. It was bad enough in winter, worse in summer. The front line and its debris made an ugly gash across the French landscape at a time when the meadows should have been lush with grass, the trees graceful in new leaf and full of the twitter of nesting birds.
    The vicar took another scone from the tiered plate. ‘Of course the French haven’t got the leadership we have. Haig’s been biding his time, but this will be a master plan.’
    Master plans, new pushes—they cost lives, Edmund knew that. To the vicar and his father it was like bringing on a new spin-bowler in a cricket match; an interesting tactic, when viewed from the sidelines. Edmund knew that the front-line soldier saw the war not in terms of master plans, strategies or maps of Europe but as a few hundred yards of scarred earth, another day survived, another wiring party accomplished without shameful loss of nerve. On his way back from Arras, injured, he had seen a batch of new recruits arriving in Boulogne, many of them alarmingly young; some had looked like schoolboys. But at least they had chosen to enlist. Now the Government was bringing in conscription.
    ‘So, Edmund,’ the vicar said, noticing his withdrawal from the conversation, ‘five more days at home, then back to your unit?’
    Edmund nodded. His father said, ‘The Fitches are dining with us tomorrow.’
    The two men exchanged glances. Edmund knew what that meant.
    ‘Good,’ said the vicar, sipping tea. ‘And how is Philippa?’
    ‘Very well,’ said Edmund’s father. ‘Looking very well indeed last time I saw her.’
    At this point Edmund was supposed to betray interest. Instead he looked away, towards the ha-ha. Slipping a hand into his pocket he felt the smooth rectangle of a letter; he touched it, caressed it. As soon as the tiresome vicar had gone he