“Yeh?” he said. Then after a moment, when Benson didn’t answer, “What you want, mate?” The voice was chesty, clogged somehow; and in it there was already a rising tone of suspicion or belligerence, tone of the wretched, who have much to fear.

  “You don’t recognise me,” Benson said. “Do you remember someone called Benson? We were together in the war.”

  There was a smell from inside, a fetid compound of odours not immediately identifiable. Benson heard or thought he heard a brief phrase of birdsong. “Benson,” he repeated, smiling. The lonely announcement of identity, here on the step, was painful to him. This was it then, the shape the years had pressed out.

  “Benson? No Benson here, mate. It’s the bloke was here before you want to see.” He was beginning to close the door.

  “No, no, I am Benson. You’re Thompson, aren’t you? C-Company, Second Royal Wiltshires. We were in the same platoon. We were at Anzio together.” He brought the bottle out of his pocket and held it up. “I thought we might have a drink on it,” he said. “You know, old times.”

  “Anzio,” Thompson said. His eye was on the bottle. “How’d you know where to find me?”

  “I saw you just now. Outside in the street. I recognised you.”

  Thompson looked at him for some moments in silence. He did not ask how he had been recognised. From somewhere above them came a sudden blare of music as if a radio had been turned up. “Them blacks,” Thompson said. “That’s a bleeding lifetime ago. There was a Benson. Digger, they called him.”

  Bleeding deathtime ago, Benson thought, veteran word-smith, standing there on the step, holding up his bottle. He had never to his knowledge been called Digger. “You’ve got a good memory,” he said.

  “Some things you remember.” Thompson opened the door wider and stepped back. “Always digging, you was. You better come in. You go first, I got to see to the door. Mind the bird.” He was fumbling with a block of wood nailed against the door to act as a bolt. “People round here is thieves,” he said.

  In the narrow lobby there was a wire cage on the floor with a goldfinch in it. Unsteady light was coming from an open door beyond this. Benson walked past the cage into a small bare room where an oil lamp inside a globe of milk-coloured glass gave tremulous light. There was an ancient, cylindrical paraffin stove which had just been lit – he could smell the heating metal and see the coil of blue flame through the blistered celluloid panel. Near the wall stood a wooden hutch with a big grey-blue rabbit in it, pressing an inquisitive nose against the wire mesh. Not much else: bare boards of the floor, two upturned boxes, one with a tin kettle and white china mug on it, a slashed, half-gutted black sofa, listing on one side where the casters had come off, a heap of bedding in one corner. Thompson’s abode. Everywhere on the walls were the mottled stains of damp, fluent bruises on the original pale green of the paint. The floor was gritty with plaster dust, he could feel the slight crunch of it under his feet. Glancing up he saw a flaking delta of fissures in the ceiling. There were long vertical gashes on the walls too, from which the plaster had leaked. Behind him came the slow shuffle of Thompson’s step.

  “I got to find a place to put that bird,” Thompson said, in his laborious, impeded voice. “They like to be higher. Keep your coat on till it warms up. It takes a bit of time to get warm in here, that’s one of the drawbacks.”

  “That’s a fine rabbit,” Benson said.

  “That’s Brenda.”

  In response to their combined regard, Brenda flattened her handsomely fringed ears and stared back with pensive eyes through the mesh of her cage. She wrinkled her nostrils delicately, as if investigating Benson’s aura. A smell of pissy sawdust came from her hutch.

  “Pedigree chinchilla,” Thompson said. “I know where I could get twenty-five quid for that rabbit. Now. Tonight. Cash. Trouble is I only got one article here that a peson could drink out of. I been travelling light.”

  “I can drink from the bottle.” He had placed this on one of the upturned boxes and busied himself now unscrewing the top, pouring some out into the chipped white mug. When he turned round again he had the brief impression that a stranger had entered the room and was sitting on the sofa; then he realised that it was Thompson without his cap. The other man’s face was fully revealed in the lamp light; and on it, with total certainty, Benson saw the print of death.

  Perception is a leaping thing and the gatherings of the leap are always obscure. It seemed now to Benson that he had heard death in that palsied singing, that he had sensed it while he followed Thompson’s slow steps back here to his lair, that the knowledge had informed the memories of these recent days and nights. It was in confirmation, not in any doubt, that he registered the sunken, colourless eyes under the fair brows, the narrow mouth, the drained pallor of the skin, the incongruous splash of colour on the cheek. Thompson’s small, neat skull was more evident, clearer in shape now that the hair was so sparse – his scalp showed through dead white. The eyes that looked at Benson were bemused and fierce, eyes of an animal unable to understand its own ruin.

  Nothing was sure on this face except the imminence of its dissolution; this larger truth swamped the piecemeal operation of memory, made even familiar features questionable, even the birthmark; but Benson remembered suddenly now the delicacy of skin that Thompson had possessed and the undefended eyes with their short lashes – he had suffered in the hot sunshine of that May, before the offensive.

  “Well, cheers, mate,” Thompson said. “It’s a small world.”

  “Cheers.” It seemed at that moment a very large one that could contain them both. He did not know what to say to Thompson. It was hot in the room now but the other still kept on his coat. Benson slipped off his own coat and laid it folded on the dusty floor beside the box on which he was sitting. The smell was intensifying with the heat, a compound reek of damp-soft plaster, sodden sawdust from the rabbit’s cage, acrid odours from the bedding and from the folds of Thompson’s person. With a curiosity intense but strangely limited, physical, he watched the brief convulsion of the other’s throat as he drank. That death on his face gave him dominance, made all his actions momentous: it was with a sense of breaking free that Benson raised the bottle. “Happy landings,” he said.

  “Them was the days.” Thompson took another drink. His mouth made a thin smile and his head shuddered slightly. “Them was the days all right. Smoke?” He had taken out a tin in which were some hand-rolled cigarettes.

  “No thanks. I don’t smoke very often.” He was pretty sure Thompson’s cigarettes had been made up from buttends gathered in the street.

  “Them was the frigging days all right,” Thompson said. “How did you know I was here?”

  He saw that Thompson was peering closely at him through the smoke of the cigarette. In the silence he could hear the goldfinch moving in its cage outside. “I didn’t,” he said. “I told you, I passed you just now in the street, I recognised you by—”

  “An accident, that’s what you’re saying. You knew me by this.” He touched his cheek for a second. Without speaking he held out his mug for more whisky. He was drinking fast. “You live round here then?” He said.

  “Greville Street.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “Off Hardman Street, not far from the Philharmonic.”

  “That’s bleeding miles away. What you doing down here?”

  “Just walking.”

  “Just walking,” Thompson repeated slowly. “It’s midnight, you got a full bottle of whisky in your pocket, you see me in the street and you know me by this.” Again he raised a hand to his cheek. “That’s what you’re saying.”

  “That’s right.”

  Thompson’s mouth stretched in a brief smile, exposing yellow, strong-looking teeth. “Funny how things come together,” he said. “You can go for years, nothing happens. You wasn’t sent, I suppose?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Nah, ’course not.” Thompson was silent for a moment. Then he said in a different tone, “Digger Benson, that was it. You was always digging. Still at it, ain’t you?”

  “I was never called Digger, you know – I meant to tell you.” Benson had begun to feel uneasy. The drink was effecting a change in Thompson’s manner but the nature of the change seemed caused by something else; it was as if Thompson thought they shared some knowledge that was not from the past, not from the war. “No,” he said, “I think you’re mixing me up with someone else. Of course, it’s a long time ago now. No, I was Velma.” He met Thompson’s strange stare, lingering, confused and fierce. “Velma, the Beachhead Vamp,” he said. “You must remember that. I did a song and dance act with a man called Walters. He was Burlington Bertie. Every Little Movement Tells a Tale - that was the song we did. Don’t you remember?”

  “Course I bloody remember.”

  There was a snarl in this, a quarrelsome note – he had not liked being contradicted over the nickname. Benson remained silent for some moments. He thought of leaving. It would be a relief to get out into the open, escape from the squalor of the place, the fetid smells, the look of death on Thompson’s face. But he could not leave with nothing, could not return home with nothing … “Slater’s Show,” he said.

  “You a friend of his?”

  Benson looked back in silence, at a loss how to answer. A musical rasp came from the hutch against the wall: Brenda had put her forelegs up against the taut mesh. “I haven’t seen him since those days,” he said. “He came to see me in the hospital after I was wounded.”

  Thompson nodded slowly. The whisky had brought traces of colour to his cheeks. “If it was my own place,” he said, “I could have a few ideas about it. If I could get a bit of capital together, know what I mean?” He looked round the small room with its mess of plaster on the floor, the cracked and crumbling ceiling, the mottled bruises of damp, the gashed walls. “Bit of a sweep-out,” he said. “Coat of paint. Works wonders. Bit of nice pinewood furniture. I could make this place into a home from home. You get sick of moving around. Besides, there is the animals. I got to get the animals together. I got a prize-winning hamster being looked after for me in Leeds. I got two budgies in Huddersfield. I can do without the electric and the gas, that’s no problem. But I got to have some capital.”

  He was silent for a while and the wheeze of his breath was audible in the room. “No bleeding choice, anyway,” he said at last.

  “Why? Have the services been cut off?”

  “Cut off? Jesus Christ. They never been on, not while I been here. I’m not talking about the services, for Chrissake, I’m talking about the metalwork, the pipes.” He held out the mug for more whisky. The bottle was half-empty now and Thompson had accounted for the greater part of it. The effects showed in his thicker speech, in the greater openness of his contempt, oddly at variance with the vagueness, the bafflement, that would now and again come to his face. Benson remembered it now, this contempt. It had survived the ruin of the years. Contempt had kept Thompson solitary in the Wadis, not only the desire for loot.

  “What pipes?” he said.

  “Jesus Christ. They broke in here, didn’t they? They knocked the boards out and come in through the window. Broad daylight. They took everything, all the metal. There was a bit of lead piping through there, they took it.” He nodded in the direction of a door near Brenda’s hutch. “They took the taps, they took out the water pipes for the copper. They took the wiring out the walls.” He looked round the room slowly, in pallid and furious outrage. “They stripped the place,” he said. “I don’t know what this country is coming to. You would think there would be such a thing as neighbours, fucking solidarity in a place like this, people living here ain’t got much, but no, all the empty flats in this block been done. They would take the bread out of your mouth. I come back here to find the place stripped. An old man like me. How old are you?”

  “Sixty-three.”

  “I’m sixty-eight. You come back to find not one bit of metal in the place.”

  Thompson’s eyes had lost focus now but his face still wore that expression of angry bafflement as he looked round his devastated room. “Neat job,” he said. “They didn’t do no unnecessary damage. They didn’t touch me rabbit or me bird. But that’s not the bleeding point, is it? I got to get a kettle of water from upstairs if I want to brew up.” He paused, then said with sudden rage, “A hundred quid, he wouldn’t feel it. They owe us the money. I’m going soon as I feel a bit better. Haven’t been feeling well lately, everything I do makes me breathe heavy. It’s no bloody good sending people with whisky.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “We done our bit, that’s what I bloody mean.”

  You did more, Benson thought, remembering the solitary expeditions, the trophies, the stain of ecstasy on the battledress trousers. “Nobody sent me,” he said slowly. They are the same, he had to remind himself, that distant killer and this dying man in whom the drink seemed to have intensified some mania.

  “Business good, is it?”

  It took Benson some moments to realise that this was Thompson’s way of asking him about his life. “Yes,” he said, “I suppose so.” One could hardly complain of poverty or neglect to a man living like a rat in a hole.

  “What line are you in?”

  “I’m a writer, a novelist – historical fiction mainly. Haven’t done much lately as a matter of fact. Bit of a block, you know.”

  “Block?” Thompson said. “Novelist?”

  “Yes, but as I say, lately—”

  “Done pretty well for yourself, have you?” There was doubt in this. At some point Thompson had registered the well-worn sports jacket, vaguely oatmeal in colour, the far from pristine cotton trousers, the scuffed suede shoes.

  “Not particularly.” Benson shrugged. “I’ve never made much money.”

  “I know what you mean, mate.”

  It was the note to start him, like a tuning-fork. In wheezing tones, with frequent pauses, he began to relate his career. This was a confused story and difficult to follow because Thompson himself did not seem sure of the order of events. There were quarrels and divisions in it, wanderings, blows of fortune. No talk of wife or children. He had stayed on in Germany after the war, worked in a club in the Allied Zone, a period of affluence this. After that he had gone back to the army, fought in Malaya. There had been a period as an assistant in a shoe-shop in Peterborough, various jobs in hotel kitchens, a woman named Bella who had let him down badly, God help her if he met up with her again, a rifle-range on the Pleasure Beach at Blackpool, lengthening periods of unemployment, a confused story of a pet-shop, someone who had done him out of five hundred pounds. “God help him,” Thompson said, “if I meet up with him again. Now I don’t even get the full fucking pension,” he said. “I missed out on me stamps.”

  Benson nodded. These wavering lines had ended here – Thompson was back underground again. The talents he had shown in the Wadis had been no use outside. Serving drinks, carrying people’s luggage in the livery of some seaside hotel, easing with his shoe-horn the passage of the soft foot into the stiff new shoe, singing with crippled gait on the corner of Bold Street – all these were assumed roles somehow, like the shifts and disguises of persons sought – or feared – in dreams. His career had been a masquerade, rendered spurious by those few months of his authentic existence, when duty had coincided with talent and pleasure with reward.

  “I haven’t been feeling so good lately,” he said. “Do you remember them cats?”

  “What cats?”

  “There in the Wadis. Place was full of blind cats, the owls blinded them. You could hear them crying. I used to feel sorry for them.”

  “No,” Benson said, “I don’t remember the cats. There were dead sheep everywhere, I remember that.” Both sides had used sheep as mine detectors. “And the nightingales,” he said. “Singing through it all.”

  “They was claiming their territory.” Thompson got up and replenished his mug with movements that were fumbling and unsteady. His hands were small, blunt-fingered, the backs of them covered with purplish blotches.

  “Do you remember the beetle races?” Benson said. His eyes were smarting, he had to narrow them constantly to keep Thompson in focus. “You remember,” he said. “Back at B-echelon. They used to chalk out a circle and put the beetles in the middle. The winner was the one that got to the chalk line first. Crocker had a champion, used to make twenty pounds on a race, then one day this Canadian trod on it accidentally on purpose, you know, and there was a fight-”

  “Crocker?”

  “You remember Crocker, don’t you? Remember that day he got blood in his hair? It was in that German helmet you brought back.”

  “There was a Crocker,” Thompson said.

  “He was killed in May, in the break-out.”

  “I don’t remember bringing back no helmet. What would I want with a Kraut helmet?”

  “Do you remember that one we shot? Well, I shot him. You know, that one we just came upon. He had got the lie of the land wrong somehow. He was sitting up there, right in the open. It was sunny, a sunny day.”

  He looked across at Thompson and saw nothing, no faintest shadow of recollection in the pale, dazed eyes. “He was combing his hair,” he said. In an effort to stimulate Thompson’s memory he raised a hand and made combing motions. “He had forgotten there was a war on. He had forgotten where he was. He didn’t know anything till he heard the click of the bolt. We watched him, we were together, you and me. You told me to shoot him. I got him in the head. He had forgotten what his part was, he was being somebody else. It was a different kind of performance, different from the one we were putting on.” He knew this was the wrong language, wrong for Thompson; but he had no other – these were the elements that had lived on in his mind for forty years. “He made a sound like a hen,” he said. “Do you mean to say you don’t remember?”

  He looked at Thompson incredulously. Was he pretending? Narrowing his eyes for better focus, he scanned the other’s face, as if the secret of this amazing forgetfulness might lie there, in that deathly pallor from which even the flush of drink had faded now, in the flaring trefoil of the birthmark, the narrow, bloodless mouth, the eyes almost colourless, like shallow water below dull sky. The face of a bleached ferret, tenacious, undistinguished; but it had the fascination, for Benson, of a mystery of survival – as if he had unearthed, in some obscure recess, an object of childhood terror or delight, seen now with sadness, with wonder at the creature he himself had been, that had survived.