The Winter Ghosts Read Free

notch, cracking like the tired winding mechanism on our old grandfather clock, and my arm fell back to my side in despair.
    There was nobody there. There never would be.
    I pushed my hands deep into the pockets of my overcoat as the bell in the cloche-mur struck four, the notes echoing away into nothing in the damp air. In those days, the truth was that though I feared to see him, I grieved when he did not come. And when he did, I felt a rush of joy, elation, and for a moment was able to believe he was still alive. That it had all been a stupid mistake.
    Then I would remember and my haggard heart would fold in upon itself once more.
    ‘George,’ I whispered, knowing there would be no answer.
    I slumped down on the ledge of the memorial. As I leaned against the stone for support, I was conscious of the names of the dead pressing against my back as if they were engraving themselves on my skin.
    The familiar image of a photograph slipped into my mind. Once it had sat on the sideboard at home in a tortoiseshell frame. Now I carried it loose in the bottom of my suitcase. Taken in September 1914, it was fixed in the sepia tones of the past. Mother sat in the centre of the photograph, beautiful and remote in her high-necked blouse and brooch. Standing behind her, Father on one side and George on the other, proud in his uniform. The garter badge and Roussillon plume gleamed on his cap. Captain George Watson, Royal Sussex Regiment, 39th Division.
    I am sitting a little apart from the tableau, an awkward adolescent of thirteen. My hair is lying not quite flat. At the moment the shutter clicked, something made me turn away from the camera and towards George. Over the years I have examined and re-examined the photograph, trying to read the expression in my eyes. Is it his reassurance I am seeking, his admiration? Or is it rather a child’s impotent anger at being made to collude in such a charade? I don’t know. However many times I stare at that dusty, captured moment and try to remember what was going through my mind, I can’t.
    Two days later, George was sent to join the 13th Battalion in France. I do recall how proud Father was, how boastful Mother, and how full of dread was I. Crippling, overpowering dread. Even then, I knew that road would not lead to glory.
    How long did I sit there on that cold winter seat in Tarascon, the chill seeping through the heavy fabric of my coat and tweeds? Time stretches and shrinks, does not stay fixed when we most need it to. I thought of my parents, distant and uninterested. Of George, of all those who had died, becoming less defined as the years went by. The simple truth was that I was burdened by my life and the fact of George’s death.
    With hindsight, I see that all these emotions assaulted me simultaneously. Delusion and hope and longing, all tumbling one after the other like a falling line of dominoes. It was, after all, a path well-worn. A decade of mourning leaves its footprints on the heart.
    Finally, I pulled myself together and moved on, grateful for the darkness. I stopped a while at the church and attempted to decipher the handwritten notice set outside on the wall, forcing myself to concentrate on the words. It appeared that the name - La Daurade - was derived from ‘ daurado ’ in the local language, which meant ‘golden one’ or ‘gilded one’, and referred to a statue of the Virgin that had once been housed within the church. I tried to ignite a spark of interest, if nothing else out of respect for my previous, short-lived employment in a firm of ecclesiastical architects. But in truth, I felt nothing. And my thoughts insisted on spiralling back to the dead sleeping in the cold earth. Shattered bones and mud and blood. The headstones and the graves, the wild and untended places between.
    I shook my head. I didn’t want to be haunted by images of George’s final hours, of barbed wire, limbs tangled and trapped and torn. I did not want to hear the crump of the guns or the