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of care. War had been his first experience of violence. He’d run bets for violent men as a kid, who hadn’t? But they’d seen something in him, a fissure of gentleness, of innocence, and had taken him under their ample wings and protected him as if he was the mirror of their own lost souls.
    Days off, after rain, he built sandcastles on the beach. Soon, castles turned into villages, ruddy intricate things with moats and boats, fairy-tale imaginings that soothed him. Digging like a dog, he made sure that everything unpleasant – everything fetid – was buried like shit in the sand.
    Oh, he could have lived there all right. Sitting at a table in the outside for ever and for ever unknown, never thinking about the letter or returning to England because in his mind it was as far away as the moon and just as blue. It was perfect. For a whole year. So bloody parfait .
    But then his mind began to play tricks. Memories had taken root in the cool of that bottomless dark and had broken through like marram grass, binding and enduring, and soon he saw faces again and smelt the acrid stench of burning hair, and so he took off in the night. No goodbyes, no thank yous. Just him running from what had been good.
    He kept away from stations and ports and headed inland and further north to the hidden hamlets and farmsteads in need of men. He slept in barns and the movement of the cows was good company in the twilight. He lived like a monk, quiet and alone. Did his job and ate bread and cheese and the occasional stew, and he never spent the money that came his way. And then one night, outside Tours, the daughter of the house crept to the barn and bedded down beside him. She unbuttoned him and took him in hand. He was embarrassed, blamed the proximity of livestock with all their snorting and all their pissing. But she knew a lot for a girl of eighteen and she bent down and took him in her mouth and he grew hard in her mouth and that seemed to quieten the cows. He came quickly. He didn’t move and she didn’t move. He stroked her hair to see if she had fallen asleep. She lifted her head, her mouth glistening and inviting. Nobody had ever done that to him before and he doubted anyone would again, so he kissed her hard and even the discomfort of tasting himself couldn’t halt the strange peace he momentarily felt.
    They sat side by side, backs against the old barn wall. Strangers. Not talking, not hoping. She left at the sound of her father’s call. Adieu , she said. Farewell. Alone in the stall, the fetid stink from the straw softened and became for him the smell of a rimy cheese, and he felt so hungry he could have chewed his fucking hand off. He ate the last of his bread and realised that it wasn’t hunger that he felt but loneliness. It was an empty space where a heart should have been. That’s when he decided to return to England. He needed to find something that belonged in his chest, if only to stop the hunger.
    Drake stubbed out his cigarette. He got up from the bed and pulled back the curtains. The pavements glistened but the rain had stopped. He lifted his suitcase on to the bed and flicked open the catch. He took out a half-drunk bottle of gin, put it into his raincoat pocket and was about to open the door when his sight was drawn back to the letter. Tomorrow, he whispered. I promise you, tomorrow. He left his room and the argument next door and headed down the stairs, out into a darkness unadorned by barrage balloons and crisscross shafts of searching light. Headed out into the sweet silence of a world at peace.

6

    T he streets were empty. Night had devoured the living like an ancient plague. Faint outlines of buildings and people could still be seen in the desolate maws where daisies now grew. Ghosts had never bothered him, only the living had, and occasionally he heard footsteps behind but on turning saw his own edginess startle in a streak of gaslight. He veered down St John Street where St Paul’s rose in the distance. A