17th September 1918

I long for you. Simply that. Still.

Enid had never had Vivian’s faith and confidence. She had not trusted that he would come back, because why should he? Any more than Michael, than Aubrey, than the hundreds of thousands of other men? She fell to her knees and hammered the earth with her small screwed-up fists. Vivian ran to her, but once she was within a foot, she dared not touch. Enid’s face was a snarled mass of panic and resentment, shock and regret. Vivian felt cursed by the look.

‘No. No. No.’

Enid looked up and nodded manically. She held the War Office B104-82 form crushed in her fist. Devastation. Vivian had never understood the word in its entirety, but there it was on this mother’s face. ‘They’ve bombed his hospital. Bombed the wounded. There isn’t even a body. Nothing left of him. Nothing. My boy. My poor boy.’

JUNE 1923

52

THE MORNING SEEMED frail; a pale yellow veiled the would-be blue sky. Delicate but possible. Verging on the promising. It would be better if it stayed dry. Bearable. The air was damp with dew and tears but smelt of fertility; grass, not death.

Epehy Wood Farm Cemetery was the final resting place of the men who had died wrenching the small village from the enemy’s clutches in April 1917; of those who fell as the Germans regained it on 22nd March 1918; and of those who died as the Allies fought once again for control on 18th September 1918. Of the 997 burials, 235 remained unidentified, and there were twenty-nine additional special memorials to men believed to be buried there, although no one could say for sure. It was hard to be exact. There were names that couldn’t find bodies, bodies that couldn’t find names. Carnage could not, it seemed, be definitively counted. This was something Howard Henderson had known at the beginning of the war.

Lieutenant Colonel Aubrey Owens’ grave lay in the east of the cemetery. Five rows from the perimeter, sixth grave to the left. The uniformity and enormity of the number of plots left some fazed and distraught. Vivian thought there was something peaceful and fair about the egalitarian nature of the stones. One man’s sacrifice was the same as the next. As the next.

She didn’t need gloves. She wasn’t sure why she’d worn them in June. It had seemed fittingly austere and formal. Now her palms sweated. She peeled them off and pushed them into her pocket. A bee buzzed past her ear; she didn’t bother to swipe it away. Whilst the clean white stones of identical shape and size looked like hard pillows, she thought they were made soft by the verdant grass and purple flowers that stretched as far as the eye could see. The bee settled on the flowers in front of Aubrey’s grave. The flower trembled.

This pilgrimage to France was expensive, and Mabel certainly did not seem to be appreciating the gravity of the visit. Instead she appeared to find the experience an exciting adventure, as children did. Then again, Vivian had to acknowledge that that irrepressible energy, the ability to look forward not backwards, was what made children encouraging and wonderful. Mabel had insisted on carrying the map of the cemetery and counting out the rows in a loud voice, stretching out her strides to try to match the width of the graves, bouncing as though it was a game. Her plaits were working loose. One was often soggy, as she had a habit of sucking the end of it, no matter how often Vivian threatened that she’d get tangles of hair in her stomach.