Too Bad to Die: A Novel - Hardcover

PROLOGUE

MAY 22, 1917

He learned about Mokie the day the new boy arrived.

May was utterly the wrong time of year for new boys, of course. There were only a few weeks left before the Long Vac. Which meant there was probably something very wrong with this one, some reason he’d been shifted to Durnford so late in the term, an infraction so unspeakable he’d been booted out on his nine-year-old arse from the last obscure refuge that had agreed to raise him.

The new boy was bony and slight, a pale-faced number with springy tufts of brown hair all over his knobby skull. He had a sharp chin and wide cheekbones, and this, combined with the tuftiness of his head, suggested a young hawk fresh from its shell. The boy’s eyes were hawkish as well, winkingly bright, the color of cold pond water. They studied Ian as he stood, ramrod straight and miserable, before the Head’s closed study door.

“Hiya, kid.”

Crikey, Ian thought. A Yank.

“Are you up for a beating, too?” The boy slouched over, hands shoved in his pockets. “What does he use? Cane or slipper?”

“Depends.”

“On how bad you are?”

Ian nodded warily. He had no time for Yanks who appeared without explanation in late May. His heart was racing as it always did when he faced Tom Pellat’s door, awaiting his turn, the methodical swack of a plimsoll on a padded bottom filtering thickly to his ears. TP usually slippered his boys, but he’d been very angry this morning when Ian’s Latin grammar was pulled foul and dripping from the privy. Ian hadn’t tossed it there, but he knew that if he told who had, his head would be stuffed in the privy next. He was afraid TP would cane him. Canings drew blood. His face would crumple and he would disgrace himself.

The Yank thrust his shoulders against the wall. “I try to get a beating the first day at every school. It helps me size up the Enemy. Figure out what he’s made of.”

“TP’s a good sort, really,” Ian said. “He doesn’t beat us for fun. It’s for the Greater Good of England.”

The Yank snorted. “I don’t give a darn about that. How often does he do it?”

“Well . . .” Ian shifted uncomfortably. “Three or four times a week. But then, I’m very bad. How many schools have you been to?”

The Yank jingled a few coins in his pocket. “One at home, when I was little. Then two in Switzerland—I had to leave both of those. And then, in Vienna? Gosh—I lost count.”

“Vienna? You mean—Austria?”

He grinned. “Good ol’ Hapsburg Empire.”

“You’ve moved rather a lot,” Ian observed curiously.

“My dad’s with the embassy.”

“My father’s at the Front,” Ian said. “He’s a major of Hussars.”

“What’s uhzars?”

Ian scowled. “A cavalry officer. Don’t you know anything?”

“Not about England.” The Yank stuck out his hand. “I’m Hudson, by the way. What’s your name?”

“Fleming.” Although mostly he was called Phlegm. With a particularly disgusting gob of spittle attached, when most people said it. He shook Hudson’s hand and hoped his own was not too damp.

“Wait a sec—” Hudson stared at him. “You’re not the grind? The Fancy-Pants everybody’s in love with?”

“That’s my brother. Peter. Only he’s been sent home. Tonsils. He’s eleven.”

The Yank whistled through his front teeth. “I don’t know how you stand it. I just got here, and all I’ve heard is ‘Fleming says . . .’ and ‘Fleming thinks . . .’ If I had a brother like yours, I’d slug him. Or change my name.”

Ian bit his lip. His name was Mokie’s name and he wouldn’t change it for worlds. “Peter’s not so very grand, really. Mamma says he’s delicate. He has to have flannels on his chest and drink nasty tonics. He shall probably be Taken, Mamma says, because he’s too good to live.”

“Grinds always are.”

“I shall live forever,” Ian said gloomily.

The plimsoll sounds had died away in TP’s office. He fancied he heard sniffling, a wet admission of inferiority. It would be his turn next. He closed his eyes and saw a length of rattan hissing through the tobacco fug of TP’s rooms.

Nobody would dare to stuff Peter’s Latin in the privy. Peter would never be caned in his life.

“My mother was too good to live,” Hudson said suddenly. “There was a baby, too, but it didn’t live, either.”

“I expect it was a girl, then,” Ian offered.

“Dad didn’t say. He just packed us up and made tracks for England.”

Ian listened for TP’s footsteps across the worn wooden floor. The brass knob would turn with a metallic screech and there would be TP’s face, purple with the outrage of Ian’s grammar.

“We buried my mom there. In Vienna.” Hudson’s voice was a bit shaky and his knees were buckling. He slid slowly to the ground. “Dad said we had to. Her family’s Austrian.”

Ian whistled. “You mean you’re related to Huns?”

“Not after this war.”

Ian rocked uneasily on his heels, too well trained to sit on the floor. It must be terrible to be a Yank with a father who didn’t fight and a mother who was too good to live but was still the wrong sort, after all. Hudson was taking a chance, telling Ian about himself. He clearly lived in an appalling state of innocence that would get him killed at Durnford School within the week. Ian thought, suddenly, that he would have to be Hudson’s friend now, whether he liked it or not. He would call him Hudders and show him the best places for tiffin in the village, and the best spots for plover’s eggs anywhere on the Isle of Purbeck.

The door behind him opened. A small boy sidled out, his hands to his backside. His nose was streaming.

“Ah. Fleming.” To Ian’s surprise, TP was not grim and furious. He wore a tender expression Ian had never seen before, and the strangeness of it was terrifying.

Peter, he thought. Taken. His stomach twisted and he was afraid he might be sick.

“Come inside; there’s a stout lad.” TP scowled at the pile of loose limbs that was Hudson. “Get off the floor, boy. I won’t be wanting you today.”

—

THE HEADMASTER moved a pile of letters from an aged club chair and suggested Ian sit on it. He pulled up a hard-backed one himself, his large hands dangling between his knees. TP was beloved for the way he bellowed “Nell!” whenever he misplaced his wife, for his magnificent mustache and spectacles, for his ancient tweeds and his willingness to dive with the boys off Dancing Ledge into the frigid English Channel. He had Tennyson by heart. He was less well versed in tragedy.

“There’s been a telegram,” he said.

“From home?”

“Afraid so, old man.” TP cleared his throat with a noise like gargling. “You must be proud, Fleming. Very proud. He died for King and Country.”

Peter. With his throat bound up and his special treats. Ian hadn’t known it was for England. A buzzing began in his ears and TP’s face blurred at the edges. The buzzing grew louder, and behind it the thud of his heart, as he glimpsed the thought at the edge of his brain, the words he must never say. Not Peter. Somebody else. TP was still talking, the same tender look on his face. Ian was going to scream.

“. . . a hero, Fleming. We must all wish for such a glorious end. Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.”

Ian sat rigidly in his chair while the Latin washed over him. He would not think of Mokie. Who, if he once walked into Ian’s brain, would be killed absolutely and forever.

“. . . mortar attack,” TP was saying. “Near St. Quentin. Your father meant to take the trench. He’ll be mentioned in dispatches, I expect. Perhaps even in the Times. You must do your best to be worthy of him, Fleming.”

Ian felt his throat constrict, his air cut off. He tried to swallow.

The Headmaster grunted. “Good man. Now stand up and take your punishment.”

Ian got to his feet. He bent over.

Six of the best, from his own plimsoll. He didn’t care, this time, how hard he cried.

—

“I GUESS HE WAS TOO GOOD TO LIVE,” Hudders whispered from his cot after Lights Out that evening.

Ian did not reply. He’d cadged a candle from Commons and wedged it in a crack in the floorboards. His head dangled from the side of his bunk; the copybook was on the floor and his fingers gripped a bit of pencil painfully.

. . . the wistling sound of shells acrost the muddy grownd.

Forard! cried the stern Majer. He razed his arm and advanst there was a birst of light and . . .

“What are you doing?” Hudders asked.

Ian kicked out with his legs.

“You’re writing? What is it? Let me see.”

“Shhhhhh,” Ian hissed. Writing was his secret, his way of flying through the unheated rooms and grimy windows of Durnford School and back to London, or maybe Arnisdale, where the dogs were, and Cook let you sit on a stool by the kitchen stove on wet days, eating lamb pies with drippings. He kept the copybook under his mattress, along with his Bear, and he never took either of them out until the deep sound of breathing throughout the dormitory assured him that he was safe.

“I play the violin,” Hudders whispered.

“Crikey.” Ian looked at him. “Don’t tell anyone, understand? They’ll think you’re wet.”

There was a silence. Ian closed his copybook and blew out his candle stub. He shoved it and the copybook under the far side of the mattress, where Hudders wouldn’t think to look.

“Did they make you learn to play?” he asked. “Your parents, I mean?”

“Didn’t have to. I like music. Everyone does in Vienna.”

“Well, you’re not there anymore.” Ian pulled up his blanket. He felt queer inside. Hudders had done it again—he’d told him something he should never have said out loud.

“I play the piano, too,” Hudders said.

“Shut up,” Ian whispered fiercely. And then, in a silent voice inside his head, the words he would utter before bed until the day he died—

Please, dear God, help me to grow up to be more like Mokie.

He lay there in the dark feeling awful. He had wanted to write about Mokie as a Hero—the sort of father who would die for King and Country. But the words had come out like a Rider Haggard story. Nell, TP’s wife, read King Solomon’s Mines to the boys at night. It was a cracking good adventure, but it wasn’t real. Mokie, dead, was horribly real.

He tried to remember what his father looked like. The sound of his voice. He wondered if it hurt terribly to die, and whether Mokie was watching him, now, from somewhere. Ian closed his eyes so as not to see his father’s face among the cobwebs in the dormitory ceiling.

Mokie had come home from the Front for Christmas, and they had all gone up to the lodge at Arnisdale for a few days. Mokie was very tired and Mamma had talked nonsense more than usual, because his father spent all his time out on the Scottish moors with his pack of bassets, stalking things instead of going to parties. Ian had followed the scent of pipe tobacco to the stables. Mokie’s face was pressed into his polo pony’s neck. His fingers were knotted in its mane. The smell of horse and tobacco mingled with the sound of his father’s sobbing. Ian had felt sick. Just like today, when he’d thought it was Peter who’d died.

“I’m to be worthy of him,” he muttered to Hudders. “Only I don’t know how.”

“Your dad wouldn’t care, I bet. You were his pal, weren’t you?”

Ian shrugged in the dark. “There are four of us boys. Everyone likes Peter best.”

“Did your dad give you a pet name? You know—one that only he used?”

“He called me Johnnie. That means Ian in English.”

There was a pause as Hudders worked this out. “I thought Ian was English,” he said cautiously.

Crikey. He didn’t know anything.

“Still.” Hudders’s whisper was triumphant. “That means you were his pal. Even though you’re beaten three times a week. I bet your dad liked you much more than your old grind of a brother, with his tonsils cut out.”

Ian curled in a ball and thought about it. He thought about Peter, who could cry in Mamma’s bed with Michael and Richard because Mokie was killed. They would feel special because they were sad—not like him, blubbing because he’d been slippered. He would never be a Hero. He was glad that Hudders at least was lying there, between him and death.

“Let’s have a club,” Ian whispered. “Just you and me.”

“What kind of club?”

“For people who are too bad to die. And if any of the others are bad enough, we shall allow them to join.”

Hudders sat up. “But if they’re good, we won’t tell them a thing. Even if they pull out our toenails.”

“Agreed. And violins, or writing, shall always be allowed. It doesn’t matter whether they’re wet.”

Ian offered his hand. Hudders shook it.

“The Too Bad Club,” he said. “For guys like us, who are forced to live.”

DAY ONE

CAIRO

THANKSGIVING DAY,
NOVEMBER 25, 1943

CHAPTER 1

For nearly four thousand years the Great Pyramid of Giza had flung its shadow like a massive shroud across the desert and silenced those who gazed upon it. Before the forging of steel, it was the tallest man-made structure on earth; and even after steel dwarfed it, the stones remained terrifying in their bulk. Their blind faces. Their inspiration of dread.

The pyramid was a Wonder in an age that had outgrown them, or thought it had, and people were more desperate to see it when its size was no longer the point. They liked to believe that in surpassing the Great Pyramid, the Modern World had conquered what it represented.

Which was Death.

The founders of Giza’s Mena House Hotel knew good value when they saw it. They were English, and understood that travelers paid more for a view. They bought Khedive Ismael’s old hunting lodge in Giza and added balconies to every room, expecting their guests to sit on them and gaze at the pyramid in the fading desert light. For decades, most of the guests did. They were grateful and blessed as they drank their gin. They talked of hiring camels and crawling through tunnels to the burial chamber of Khufu.

Not Pamela.

The Great Pyramid filled the windows of her father-in-law’s rented villa, a stone’s throw from Mena House. Pamela might have hurled a book at it, or perhaps an empty champagne bottle. One of her strappy dancing shoes. But she drew her curtains instead, and blocked out the sight.

The pyramids—Great and Small—sickened her with their stillness. The flat, impenetrable stones devoured light and exhaled darkness. They sat like God at her elbow, assuring her that she was tiny and mortal, and she hated them for it. In the rare moments when she was alone like this, Pamela could feel a grave beneath her toes, and it frightened her. She was waltzing on the edge.

She turned her back to the window—her gorgeous, supple, peach-flushed back—and stared at herself in the mirror. Like everything Pamela possessed, her evening gown was far too expensive for war. It informed the world that she had powerful friends. And that they gave her things.

Her hair glowed like warm brass. Her dark blu...