Chapter Text
There was no obvious break between himself and Bryce. None of their acquaintances or fellow actors could have had any inkling; the falling-off was almost imperceptible even to the two principals. They rehearsed together with the same zest and intensity as before, and the other actors complained just as bitterly that Bryce favoured Julian for all the plum parts. They strolled together sometimes in the early winter twilight, and Julian still occasionally visited the barracks to talk over questions of staging or to peer - as far as was possible in the troubled last months of 1944 - into the cloudy crystal ball of the future.
But an indefinable something had gone, the febrile intensity of a friendship that had trembled on the brink of more. A promised intimacy of feeling had evanesced into nothing, with a rapidity that left Julian convinced it had never meant anything in the first place.
He was, frankly, hurt. He had thought they were closer than that, to be pulled apart by... well, by anything as sordid and ridiculous as sex. If that was all the man wanted, surely it was better to have stayed away.
In this he did not reflect upon the fact that he himself had asked Hilary to sleep with him before proposing to her. Although the urgency he had felt was undeniable, he had confessed his love first, and received her own assurances in return; the lack of a proposal had been an oversight, which he had amended as soon as his attention had been drawn to it. He had assumed that she would understand the necessary consequences of his love - as it happened, she had not, but this he did not reflect upon either. He had found her; it was enough. He needed no other. Spiritually, at least.
No man could be an island in camp. Surviving on what the authorities offered was just that - bare survival, no more. One needed an ally to share food, to watch one's back, to collude in all the small, essential expediencies of camp life. In this their bond was unquestioned because it was enforced by a more pressing need than that of the emotions.
Food had begun to grow scarcer in the last months of the year. The camp authorities said what they always said: that it was beyond their control; that they did, that they had always done, everything they could for the prisoners. But it was not enough, and it never had been.
Without Red Cross parcels, eating the camp food alone, a man would die slowly by inches. The watery cabbage soup, lumpen dark bread adulterated (or so everyone swore) with sawdust, and the stinking, worm-infested lumps of cheese were not sufficient to keep body and soul together. The first men at camp had learned this only too well, for in the chaos after Dunkirk, with men being marched across Germany or transported like livestock in cattle cars by the tens of thousands, it had taken months for the first parcels to reach the camp, slashed new and raw out of the surrounding pine forest. Now it was happening again.
The Germans made few excuses, for to do so would be to betray that the war was going badly for them. Supply lines were being cut off. The Allied bombings had flattened Berlin. So came the bulletins, whispered covertly from prisoner to prisoner. Once Julian had heard it straight from Parkhurst, whom one assumed had it from the man with the secret radio. Now he had been cut out - presumed unreliable, one supposed - but the news still made its way back to him by the inevitable lines of camp gossip.
"And that's it for Berlin," said Bryce one day at the start of rehearsal. "I don't guess they'll let us rent any more costumes now."
At first Julian felt the interruption of the letters more keenly. His private parcels had been as regular and as generous as Hilary could contrive - packed, so she had said, with a consideration of both caloric density and nutritional balance. He had never felt replete while in camp; it was an impossibility. But he had had enough to persuade himself to put some by for a time of need. And now he was grateful.
His stockpile would have lasted longer if he had not shared his food with Bryce, but he never considered withholding it. Bryce had received only a few scattered parcels from friends at the beginning of the war. All that had gone long ago; he had nothing now.
Julian was dimly aware that there were other ways of finding food in camp. Theft, intrigue, gambling, throwing oneself upon the mercy of the black marketeers who seemed to control the American sector. Prostitution, once upon a time - even before he had gone on the stage Julian had found himself with no shortage of purportedly generous offers, all of which he had treated with the same polite indifference that he had shown the sixth formers at school. After his turns as Ophelia they had, for a time, become overwhelming. But that had ceased long ago; no one had the energy or desire for it now. The other possibilities remained, but Julian considered them no more likely than prostituting oneself. And Bryce, though they never discussed the question, apparently agreed.
"Don't tell me," said Bryce, using a finger-full of bread to scrape up the last scraps of potted meat from the corner of a tin. "I'm a charity case. Noblesse oblige. But I don't mind, I'm that hungry."
"You're welcome," Julian replied. "But I'll thank you not to talk about it like that."
He did not say - could not bring himself to say - that Bryce had given him far more. Not physically, but spiritually: the chance to live, to escape. To be an actor, really to act, which was more than his freedom in Gloucester had ever offered.
"You know they'll probably shoot us," Bryce added, having finished off the can and given its lid several licks for good measure. "The Germans."
"Will they? I hadn't thought."
"You never do. That's your charm. But think about it now. The Allies are coming. They're not just going to hand us back over with a thank you for the loan. We didn't come on Lend-Lease. Parkhurst and his lot must be making plans - haven't you heard anything?"
"It all sounds so silly, I try not to listen. It's like something out of Boy's Own. I escaped once, remember? But I could hardly have got far - I didn't get far - and I certainly couldn't now, even if I did somehow get outside the wire. No one is in any condition for hard marches. Can you imagine the whole camp straggling across Germany like some sort of demented chorus line?"
Bryce laughed, forced and hollow. He had hardly put in the effort to make it sound genuine.
"I just never thought I'd die here, somehow. I keep thinking of it. But we are, aren't we? Little by little or all of a sudden. I can't see any other way out."
"I never thought I would live," said Julian thoughtfully.
His stocks of food did not last long after that conversation. They were all on camp food now, an inexorable belt-tightening beyond anything one could have imagined in civilian life. They had never eaten well. Now they were well below survival rations. These were starvation rations, achieving little more than staving off death, which drew closer and closer by the day.
Julian watched the slow changes in his face with fascination. He had always been good with makeup. If he had been asked at Oxford, or afterwards, to show himself on the verge of starvation, he would have gladly complied, thinking it an exciting challenge, and certain of his success. Now he knew that he could never have got close.
(Glancingly, he thought of how he had assured Hilary that he could say how she would look in decades hence. But this was different. Even if he were wrong about Hilary, it could not matter.)
Gazing into the cracked glass in the bathhouse, he ran his fingertips lightly over his face. The skull beneath the skin, as the saying went, had never been so apparent. His cheekbones, always prominent, stood out as though they might split his cheeks in two. His eyes were wide, the flesh sunk away from their orbits. Every tendon stood out in his hands as he moved his fingers in slow fascination.
"Some of us want to shave," said a neighbour, breaking his reverie, "if you're not going to."
Julian blinked in surprise. The stubble on his face had hardly attracted his notice. By the standards of the camp his hygiene had always been scrupulous - he could never help thinking of what his mother would say if she saw him - but now letting his beard grow seemed perhaps the best of a bad lot. It would, if nothing else, disguise the terrible, staring gauntness of his features.
"Not even Narcissus is beautiful now," said another, who had clearly received a better education.
"No, I'm sorry," said Julian, unable to keep the shortness from his voice. "I'm not shaving. I was just - never mind. I'm going now."
But he lingered by the door thinking about what he had seen, the way that experience had written itself across his face, the physical engraving of it only echoing the spiritual.
Don't say I haven't changed, he imagined saying to Hilary when (God willing) he found himself in her arms once again. I have. And I'm glad.
***
Christmas came and went, as Christmas will, even in a prisoner-of-war camp. It was Julian's second in captivity, and it made the first seem an orgy of festivity by comparison.
Not a proper holiday, that much was certain, but then none of Julian's wartime Christmases had been. All of them were empty, riotous celebrations on air bases, with Hilary unable to get away from hospital (she had let this slip by easily, saying she was used to it; he could not believe her), or cursory observances in rented rooms that, for all their efforts, had never become anything like home. They never had made a home together. That thought chilled him as much as did the snow falling outside. Perhaps they never would.
His last Christmas worthy of the name had been in 1938, at home in Larch Hill. He and his mother had together observed all the correct traditions, unchanged since his boyhood. Though it was only the two of them, he had never felt deprived of a wider family circle. This was all he knew; this was what Christmas ought to be. Once or twice, when he was young, they had gone to spend the season with one of her sisters; the invitations had come without fail every year - laced, as he understood later, with unmistakeable pity. The experience had offered him nothing. He liked his cousins well enough but he - the only one without a father - had sensed their condescension even then, and resented the adults for monopolising his mother's attention. All the festivities of a large family Christmas had counted not at all against the small observances of home.
To compare the camp Christmas to his last at Larch Hill seemed unjust in the extreme - a category error, as Tranter might have put it - for that had been blessed with both home and Hilary, a conjunction that might never come again.
He did not hold himself aloof from the festivities in camp. He had saved all the food he could spare against the day - blessedly little, the very last from the packages - and duly spent a morning helping to decorate the barracks hut, Bryce's hut, with paper chains, decorations beaten out of tin, and other improvised gaiety.
"You've an eye for it," said Bryce, who could just as easily have accomplished the task himself. But that was not the point.
It was counterfeit cheer, all of it - barring the pleasure of eating, which no one needed to feign. How could they celebrate when no one knew what the new year would hold? But the conscious artifice of it fascinated Julian. He joined in without any reserve, doing his best to make the illusion real. Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die.
***
Reality was never far away. The new year brought it in abundance.
Men began to think once again of the world outside the barbed wire. To Julian it had been an abstraction ever since his first - and last - escape attempt. For some men it had been much longer. Now, unsettled, they tracked stray planes flying overhead until they were lost to view amidst the dark pine boughs. After every storm they gazed mournfully at the drifts of snow piled against the sides of the barracks, seeking to gauge its depth in the dark, silent, surrounding forest. They listened, hopeful and afraid, for the sound of distant guns.
And yet, for all the anticipation, no one was ready when the day finally came. It was early evening and the snow had begun falling hours earlier, blanketing the camp in white. Even the most dedicated of the circuit-bashers were indoors, huddled around makeshift braziers, when the guards began to cry:
"Raus! Raus!"
At first the shouts were faint, swallowed up by the snowfall. But then a guard threw open the door of their barracks - the brazier guttered in the swirl of sudden, icy air - and there was no ignoring it any longer.
"Half hour only." He was an old man whose English was better than most. "Then we march. No delays. No one to stay. The Russians will shoot you all."
Julian's barracks was thrown into immediate, violent confusion. The news could hardly be said to be a surprise; they had known for weeks that the Soviet Army was on the advance, and any fool could read the lines on the map. Pankhurst, Feathers and their friends had spent months making plans, endlessly recast: escape, rebellion, rescue, flight, playacting one scenario and then another by turns. Like Bryce they believed, or had seemed to believe, that the Germans would massacre them all sooner than give them up to the Soviets or to their freedom. But there was no sign of that belief now, and no sign of any of their painstaking preparations. All in a rush his barrack-mates began gathering up their few belongings, suddenly and hastily packing to go. As if, like Julian, they had thought to do nothing, save wait in Stalag Luft for fate to overtake them.
For a moment he stood, fascinated, watching the scene play out before him.
But of that day and hour knoweth no man, he found himself thinking, no, not the angels of heaven, but my Father only.
In the Lynchwick parish church he must have heard it read a score of times; likewise in the small camp chapel, whither he had sometimes been persuaded to go. But in his memory it was not the reading of the chaplain, nor the vicar at home - who had always cleared his throat with a rumble whenever he reached a suitably dramatic pause - but his mother's voice only.
She had taught Sunday school through all the years of his childhood, stopping only when he reached his teens, when she said that it was far past time to allow someone else the chance. As a small boy he had been struck by the distinction of having his mother as the teacher, for none of the other children could claim such an honour. She had been only too conscious of this, and at pains to counteract it; while she looked to each of the children in turn while reading, and addressed them always by name, for the most part she avoided Julian's gaze, as if it were improper to acknowledge one's own son in the midst of such a throng of dirty village children.
But he remembered that verse, how she had read it - her grey eyes finally directly meeting his own, as if she were looking into his soul and finding him wanting. Instead of pleasure he had felt only shame, and squirmed uneasily in his straight-backed wooden chair. She had read the verse with a special emphasis, so that he thought not of God, but only of his own father. She talked of him always, what he might want or believe or think of his only son. Julian knew perfectly well that he was dead - every Sunday he could see for himself the line in the church memorial - but for some reason the Bible always made him doubt it. His father was somewhere, knowing things which no man knew, and judging him always. It filled Julian with terror to think that anyone could know more than his mother.
She had explained the lesson further on their walk home, as she always did. One could hardly say so in front of the other children, but what the parable of the talents meant was that more, far more, was expected of him than ever would be of them. When one thought of all the advantages he possessed, she said, this was only just.
"And darling," she had said gently, annihilating all the pleasure he had felt in a Sunday walk by her side, "that includes sitting quietly in class, as a good boy would do."
Perhaps, thought Julian, standing in the middle of the barracks, it was just as well that he had so little now.
"You going to pull your finger out, Fleming?" asked Feathers, coming past with an armful of posessions.
Julian ignored this, as it deserved, but set to work nonetheless.
There was little to pack and little to set aside, though the sparseness of one's small collection of belongings meant that each inspired its own fierce attachment. Thankfully, unlike some, he still had his flying jacket and his boots. In fact he was wearing them, there being little choice in the current temperature. (He looked out the window at the snow blowing past and fruitlessly wished, not for the first time, that he had been shot down wearing his greatcoat.)
He picked up the stack of letters from Hilary and his mother, promiscuously mixed together as they were, and tucked them into an inside pocket of his jacket. From their hiding place inside his straw palliasse, he retrieved the medicines that Hilary had sent him, and likewise distributed them about his person. The few items of clothing he wasn't already wearing, he tucked into his pillow case to be carried on the march. Then he thought better of it and began to put them on too.
For a moment he gazed thoughtfully at his mother's angora socks. They remained as they must have been on the needle, unworn, and still the snowy, untouched natural white of Mrs. Pascoe's beloved rabbits. His mother had likely never imagined him wearing them out of bed, much less on a march. But needs must, there's nothing warmer, he told himself, and then: she'll never have to know. As he put them on, the second thought reassured him far more.
A matter of minutes and he was done. For a moment he stood studying the empty bunk where he had lain every night thinking faithfully of Hilary. He felt a pang of anticipatory nostalgia that took him by surprise; who would ever imagine regret at leaving a prison camp? But he did, in a way that he had never felt about Oxford at the end of term.
He wished that he could go and say goodbye to the theatre, but time was hastening on; some of his barrack-mates had already gone.
After a moment's thought he picked up the woolen blanket from his bed and wrapped it around his shoulders. Then he went out into the yard.
***
It was a strange Appel, taking place in the pitch of night. The guards shouted; the snow swirled, coming down even harder than before. Everyone was on edge; there was none of the usual joking or goon-bating disobedience. The commandant gave a brief speech, his words whipped away by the wind. Everyone listened but there was no more to glean than they had been told by the guard before: the Russians were coming, they were leaving immediately, there was to be no slackening of the pace or staying behind. If they did, they would be shot.
As this speech was delivered, Julian looked round with increasing anxiety. Men were pressed close around him, Feathers just to his right, Parkhurst a little distance ahead. Further away, faces were indistinct in the crowd, obscured by the veil of snow, made strange by the depth of the night. Like Julian himself, men were dressed in layers, unfamiliarly costumed, like extras in Napoleon's retreat from Moscow.
Anxiety clutched at his stomach. He could not see Bryce anywhere. It was not a matter of sentimentality. Relations with his barrack-mates had not improved since that first falling-out with Parkhurst. They had made it very clear that he was no longer any concern of theirs; they would not give him the time of day on the march, or look out for him if he fell.
But Julian's concerns were nothing to the great, implacable machinery of the camp. The motion towards the gates had already begun.
There was a bottleneck there, all the men in the camp waiting impatiently to pass the threshold that most of them had not crossed since their arrival at Stalag Luft. For Julian it was the second time, but now, this time, he was himself alone.
Far to the right he heard a lone voice raised in song. 'When the lights go on again.' A scattering of ironic cheers. It was Bryce.
They came together a little beyond the gate. Bryce had stood to one side, ignoring an old guard who was half-heartedly urging him onwards. He was wearing a costume cloak that he must have kept back from the last lot of Berlin rentals - Julian was shocked at this transgression even as he recognised its good sense - and a cap that he had knitted himself from scraps.
"Waiting for you, of course," he said, in response to Julian's questioning look. "Silly boy."
They linked arms and strode onwards into the unknown future.
***
It was very cold. The snow was coming down steadily - not the wet, clustered flakes of his Gloucestershire boyhood, but a dry, fine, constant fall of snowflakes individual, snowflakes in the millions. They caught in his eyelashes, he inhaled them and fell into a fit of coughing when he took an unwary breath, they obscured all but the nearest of vision. Under his boots the drifting snow squeaked warningly with the cold.
For long minutes Julian wondered where the railway station was, when they would come to the village, whether he might finally see Karl's cottage. Then, a slow dawning, he realised that all of them were behind him already, passed by unnoticed in the storm. How easy it was to miss everything. All one could see in the swirling white were the shadows of endless pine trees.
For the first hour it was bearable, almost enjoyable: the snow, the dark of night, the strangeness of their passage. He had Bryce by his side for companionship, and the tiny rattle of the pills in their bottles, tucked into an inner pocket of his jacket, were a reassuring talisman
Julian's feet were warm in his angora socks. He was glad of the blanket he had thrown round his shoulders at the last minute. He was glad that he had decided, once the acting had ceased, to grow a beard; it had turned out rather better than he had expected, from an aesthetic point of view, and it warmed his cheeks in the sharp wind from the East.
For the second hour it was miserable. Walking in the snow was all very well when one could anticipate going home to a warm fire and a cup of hot cocoa, when one had not spent months already with hunger a constant companion. The snow fell implacably, without respite, harder and faster and thicker. It dragged at his feet as he walked. Despite all the unaccustomed exertion of the march, despite all his efforts to shake it off, the cold sunk into him, as numbing as despair.
The third hour was hellish. After that it grew worse.
They walked all night, into a thin, dim, hungry dawn. The sky was the colour of milk diluted with water. Julian hardly noticed. He was following the tracks of the man in front of him, head down. He could not think; he did not want to. He only kept going.
It was nothing like that pleasant place in which he had drifted after being thrown from Biscuit. Truly this was purgatory.
It was the afternoon before the guards let them rest, finally far enough from the advancing Russians to stop and breathe. They collapsed where they could, littering the streets of the small village where they had paused their march, a few lucky men curling up in sheds and barns where they could find the room. The storm had passed now. A few tattered scraps of pale blue showed overhead, a sudden slant of winter light against a rough brick wall. But the sun never touched Julian, and already he could feel the night coming on.
Slowly a cart creaked its way into the village, pulled by a horse almost as emaciated as the men. One could hardly see the boards of the cart for the number of men draped across it, lying as still as so many rags. Others trailed beside, leaning against it when they might. This was the pitiful remnants of the camp hospital, whose ranks had already swollen on the march.
Julian recognised the doctor by sight, a man who had looked harassed at the best of times and now seemed to have been carried along by sheer desperation.
"No, there's nothing," he was saying to one of the medics. "Aspirin from the Red Cross parcels. I don't know what you expect me to do."
Going to step around the cart, Julian heard again the small rattle of the pills in his pocket. He felt a surge of guilt. So long had he kept them that he had almost forgotten they were not only obscure tokens of Hilary's love, but also real, tangible things that might be of service. He had, he told himself, never held them back consciously. Now there was no choice to be made.
"You should have these," he said, and winced with the cold as he unzipped his flight jacket. "Here."
His hand was shaking as he held out the bottles; the diamorph slipped from his grasp into the snow. He bent painfully to retrieve it.
"Sulfa?" exclaimed the doctor. "Phenobarbital? How the hell did you get these?"
Too late Julian realised that the man must think them stolen or obtained on the black market, meant for profit or worse.
"My wife," he said simply, for there was nothing else to say. "She's a surgeon."
For a moment the thought of Hilary's beneficent presence descended upon him like a blessing. Then, concluding that to stay would do little good, he nodded at the doctor and withdrew. Luckily no one possessed the energy to pursue him.
That night he and Bryce found themselves a resting place in a farmyard whose churned, rutted mud had frozen as solid as stone. They huddled together in a corner between the barn and the wall of the farmhouse, hoping that it would keep off the wind. Julian wrapped his blanket half around Bryce's shoulders; they leaned closer, any shyness or self-consciousness forgotten, for they could think of nothing but searching out any scrap of warmth. He could hear the rumbling of Bryce's stomach as clearly as his own. The last meagre rations, given them before they left camp, they had eaten on the march.
To be allowed to sit had at first seemed a blessing. Now the iron chill of the icy ground seeped into his body, sapping what little strength remained to him. Julian shifted painfully, trying to find a position where the armoured earth did not dig into him. He seemed to have no flesh or muscle left, only bare bones underneath his skin, and all of them ached with cold.
"It won't do you any good moving about," grumbled Bryce quietly. "One way is as bad as another."
"Sorry. I'll try to stop."
"Stop shivering while you're at it. Bad for morale. Don't you know there's a war on?"
Julian tried to muster a chuckle but it died in his throat. He could not counterfeit. He could not remember how. For the first time in his life he was left with nothing but himself.
"The war is over for us," he said.
Overhead the twilight was fading. Stars began to show in the royal blue sky, glittering and intense. The last scraps of cloud were disappearing now, leaving the sky devastatingly clear. It was glorious and terrifying, for the temperature was dropping still further.
"I used to read all about Arctic exploration," said Bryce some moments later. "When I was working in the garage. Last Voyage of the Karluk, The Worst Journey in the World, Shackleton, all of them."
"Did you?"
How odd that one could still make such motions of politeness when everything else was gone. But he hoped that Bryce would keep talking, to cover the quiet sounds of suffering around them in the dark, and the moaning wind.
"Always wanted to go on one myself. They used to bring fellows just to fetch and carry, and fix things I suppose, it wasn't all officers and scientists and that. But one has to have been to university nowadays; at least I've never seen a notice in the Times, and I did used to look."
Julian was reminded that a man in his college had gone on the Spitsbergen expedition with Glen from Balliol. It had all seemed rather romantic upon first glance, and then had resolved itself into a lot of talk about rocks, glaciation and strata. Having read English, he would never have been asked to go along anyway.
"Perhaps if we get out of this," he offered.
"No, when we get out of this I'm going to the south of France. They must need English actors down there for all the holiday-makers, mustn't they? I could find out, at least, on my demob pay. Cannes, Monaco, sun and sand. Just like in Easy Virtue..."
He sighed longingly.
"We should go, then," said Julian, who had spent a month of sincere boredom with his mother in Villefranche-sur-Mer, the year after his finals. "You and I, after the war, whether we act or not."
"And eat seven courses a day."
"No, I mean it."
Although Julian could envision the landscape of the French Riviera with perfect clarity, the idea of a three-course dinner, much less seven, seemed as remote as the moon. Bryce, perhaps feeling the same, had fallen silent.
"I went with my mother," Julian said, carrying on talking for the sake of talking. "She wanted to go; I didn't mind, at least it seemed as good a place as any. But I wonder now whether she was hoping I'd meet the right sort of girl. I hadn't at Oxford, not to propose to at any rate, and there was no one the right age near Larch Hill." He thought briefly of the village girls, of the daughters of the Duke of Beaufort, with whom he had ridden to hounds. But still it was true. "So I spent weeks having the most dreary, dutiful teas you can imagine with girls who would rather have been reading Compton Mackenzie and girls who would rather have been playing baccarat at Monte Carlo, and everyone in between. And every time she looked at me from the other side of the room I had the feeling I was doing it wrong, or she would rather I wasn't doing it at all, or something. So it all got nowhere."
Bryce laughed. "Why didn't you take them to tea somewhere else?"
"It never occurred to me. But I don't suppose that I wanted it to go anywhere, after all."
This was the most he had talked to Bryce about his mother at a stretch. They had confined themselves for the most part to the business of the theatre, and not considered their friendship any less, for they had been talking - so they felt - of what they loved most of all.
"And then you married Hilary instead," said Bryce.
"And then Hilary married me," said Julian.
There was a long silence. Somewhere in the darkness a man was coughing: long, agonising, phlegmy coughs that ended finally in a rattle, and a retch, and the sound of spitting. Then it began again.
"Don't let's talk about after the war," said Bryce. "It won't be like that. You know it won't. Maybe in fifty years when we're both old buffers at the regimental reunion. But not in the mean time. I'll be back in rep, if I'm lucky, living in bedsits for the rest of my days. You'll be... back in Gloucestershire, I suppose, playing lord of the manor. It can't be like it is now."
Julian shivered convulsively. Long ago he had become too cold to shiver, but this was something deeper than the cold. He had allowed himself to begin to believe that he would be able to go on acting beside Bryce, to make a small reputation for himself, to continue to grasp at what his time in the camp had given him. But how likely was that, when not even Bryce could believe in it?
"If we get home."
"If we get home," Bryce echoed.
There was almost a relief in thus refusing to contemplate the future, to recognise what might divide them, to acknowledge the failures that they each carried with them, baggage that remained when all other worldly encumberances and possessions had been thrown away on the march. There was nothing now but the two of them and the cold of the wind.
"Look, move this way a bit," said Bryce.
Julian obliged, pressing his side as close against his fellow man as he could manage. Bryce took the corner of the wool blanket that Julian still wore wrapped around his shoulders, and placed it around his own. He took Julian's hands in his, a sexless gesture of warmth and intimacy that seemed, to Julian, the kindest thing Bryce had ever done.
"It hardly seems to make a difference, does it?" said Bryce. "It's that arctic."
"But it's much nicer," said Julian. He attempted to squeeze Bryce's hand but his fingers were too numb to grip.
"Much nicer, my dear."
And yet Bryce was right; it did nothing against the cold. They huddled together fruitlessly, attempting to imagine warmth, a thought more distant than the moon. For what felt like hours Julian sat agonisingly awake, staring upwards at the close and pitiless stars. One could not resist, helpless in that icy grip. One could hardly even breathe.
Finally, insensibly, he drifted away. It was not sleep; it could not be gentled with that name. It was the black of unconsciousness. He had felt it before; it was the first step towards extinction. Gratefully, gladly, Julian Fleming descended into night.
Suspended in blackness, he had no need to open his eyes nor to reach out. He knew, with that knowledge that is beyond the senses: she was with him. She had not rejected him; she had come to him now, at the last. And she was holding his hand.
***
Julian felt only the impact of the slap across his face; of the brush of fingers against skin, there was nothing.
"Julian, duckie, wake up," came an angry, insistent, terrified voice. Another slap. Someone was shaking him.
He opened his eyes with difficulty, his lashes gummed with sleep and frost. It was still dark. Bryce was standing over him.
"Lord above, Julian, I thought you were dead. Get up, please. Get up."
"I was only sleeping," said Julian.
The dream came back to him now, overwhelming in its force, yet already receding into the distance of memory. He could no longer feel her touch. He only felt the truth, its meaning. He realised that he was weeping.
"What is it? Are you all right?"
Julian began to chuckle at the thought that anyone on the march after years as a prisoner could ask such a question. Then his eyes brimmed over. Cold tears tracked down his cheeks and began to freeze themselves in his beard.
He was more than all right. Finally, on the edge of death, she had given him the assurance that she had withheld before. He was forgiven everything. He was saved.
"She came to me," he said, gulping back the tears. "Everything is all right. I know now."
"My dear, you're mad."
Julian gave Bryce a brilliant smile, then wiped at his eyes with the filthy blanket. "Hadn't you noticed?"
"It doesn't matter. You have to get up. They won't wait."
Only now did Julian notice the sky. No longer black, it was lightening to a dark, bruised blue. Dawn was coming. Amidst the greys of the farmyard he could make out the dark shapes of men on the ground, lying like so many sacks of potatoes. Among them stalked the guards, here and there pushing at stragglers with the barrels of their rifles. It was morning. They were back on the march.
***
Of the next few days Julian was to remember little. It had attained the shape of nightmare, so that his dreams - coming to him sometimes, in his exhaustion, in brief, snatched moments on his feet - seemed more real than his waking existence.
Men straggled more and more. The column thinned; every so often one saw a man collapsed in a snowbank, or leaned up against a wall, finished and done. No one cared, now. None of the guards could have mustered the interest to shoot. They had their own survival to think of.
Julian could have been finished. He reflected upon this, periodically, his mind kicking into gear like a machine long abandoned but still - just - functional. He had come close to dying that night. He might well have died if Bryce had not roused him.
Once he might have regretted that he had not been allowed to slip peacefully away. Other men had given in, welcoming the end to pain as a mercy. But having come so far, he felt that such an end would be ignoble, like slipping out of the theatre before the curtain fell. He would see the thing through.
Besides, without him, who would have looked after Bryce? He thought this with a quiet sense of pride. He had looked after his ferrets with intense solicitude (too much, said his mother, with a mysterious allusion to Saki which he had not understood until years later); Biscuit, until she had banished him forever, even more so. But another human being, never. He had not imagined that anyone else could need him. Certainly it was impossible to imagine Hilary, so gloriously assured and self-sufficient, needing anyone.
Bryce needed him. They urged one another along, step by weary step. Julian supported Bryce, whose feet had become badly frostbitten. (The angora socks, thought Julian. A sign of guilty privilege to the last.) What meagre scraps of food they could gather, they shared, heated with scraps of twigs over the little brazier that Bryce had carried to the last, after his cherished copy of Hamlet had long since gone to light the flames and all his other possessions lay discarded on the road. They slept leaning together, Julian's blanket wrapped around them both.
And every night, exhausted though he was, he kept his imagined rendezvous with Hilary - the real Hilary, lest by tempting the goddess he should summon her to gather him unwished to her bosom.
All he could remember now was his need for her, a need still so strongly present that it was raw. All he dreamt of saying to her was I miss you, I need you, I can't live without you. But though he loved her, and longed for her, and worshipped her - and always would - he knew now that this last was not really true. Not now. Not anymore.
He could live without her. Painfully, he had learned this.
One day, if he lived, he hoped that he would forget it again.