2 Chapter 2

So Matty took himself back to the farm and tried to make things easier for Arthur. It was coming up to hay time and he worked long hours in the fields with the men to get it cut and stacked before the weather broke. He came home at twilight, itching and sore with exertion, but happy to be tired in a way that was easy to sleep off. The familiar rhythms of the farm settled into his blood again after four years of mud and bombs and gas and hurry-up-and-wait. Annie Beelock still tended the kitchen and the poultry, her son helped outside, and Gaffer Tom worked at the hedging and ditching. Jimmy and Rob both came home to their jobs as farmhands and that made it easier. Jim had his wife and family in the village, but Rob went back to sleeping in the loft over the far end of the ancient beam-and-cruck barn like he’d always done.

It was a small farm, but the years of war had meant that they had to work it hard and with efficiency, as the rest of the country had been worked to feed the army in Europe and the cities on the home front. His father had had a small private income before the war that meant they’d had the luxury of schooling and a touch of life outside the small farming community they had had inherited and Arthur had his writing. It felt good to be home.

Arthur though. Arthur was an enigma to him now. He’d always been the brother Matty looked up to. He was ten years older—almost too old to be called up in 1914 and anyway, reserved to work on the farm. He’d left for Oxford when Matty was eight and seemed even more god-like when he’d returned in the summers between classes. Matty had left school and worked with Father, content with the life of the farm and his round of friends and family. Arthur had gone to work on a London paper for a while, but then come home and helped as well as working as a writer. After Father died, they’d continued in the same vein until Matty had joined up.

Now Arthur was changed. Not in the way so many men were changed, still able to hear the guns and smell the rancid, rotten odour of the mud. He was quieter, yes; but he was almost frenzied in his search through his books, focused on his work but unable or unwilling to tell Matty what it was he was seeking. He was thin and stooped and his yellowed skin had the texture of crepe.

He became weaker by the day after Matty returned until two weeks ago when he’d been unable to rise from his bed. He had begun wandering in his mind, agitated and upset, sending Matty, again and again, to make sure the gates and doors were shut, and the lamps put out downstairs. He had wanted Matty to promise to burn his papers and books once he was dead. Matty had baulked at promising any such thing, despite his insistence.

The end had come quite suddenly—Matty had been sitting in the faded red brocade chair by the bed, reading aloud in the afternoon sunlight, the familiar fall and rise of Dickens rolling from his tongue without really registering in his mind. Arthur had been lying on his side with his eyes sometimes open and sometimes shut, the cotton pillowcase stark white under his yellowed cheek. His breathing had been shallow but calm.

“Matty?” he had said. “Matty, I need you to get rid of the books. Keep the gates shut and get rid of the books. Promise me.”

His eyes were huge in his thin face.

“Why, Arthur? What’s so bad about the books?”

“I don’t want you knowing,” he’d replied. “I don’t want you to have to go through this. I can’t stop it now, I left the gate open too long, I thought I could control it. There’s a line still clinging to me and I can’t get free. Once I’m gone, they won’t have a way in. Keep the gates shut, don’t try to pull, and they won’t have a way in. Burn the books, please.”

And he had let his eyes fall shut again, exhausted.

Matty had taken his hand and sat and watched the sun move across the red flocked wallpaper that their mother had chosen twenty years ago, the dust motes dancing in the golden light. Arthur’s breath had become shallower and shallower as the sunlight had become thicker and darker and golden like honey dripping off the spoon. As the twilight had fallen, the shallow breathing whispered away and everything that had made Arthur himself had left.

Matty sat and held his hand a little longer as the soft evening wrapped itself around them. Then he had straightened Arthur’s limbs and closed his eyes and tidied him under the sheet. And then he had gone downstairs and out of the front door, closing it carefully behind him. He had cranked the starter at the front of the small car he had bought a couple of weeks ago, an indulgence he’d been embarrassed to reveal to his brother, and he’d opened the yard gate, got in the car, driven through and then got out again to close it behind him—and here he was, driving on the new macadam road up over the hills, head and heart quite empty.