by Louisa Young
She thought of his eyes and his mouth, his jokes and his intensity. She remembered him up the tree, popping out from among the sun-spattered chestnut leaves, their sharp folds. She thought of that first snowball, and his black curly hair, like hers but different, and how even then she had liked how he was like her but different. She pictured a little brain and a little heart buffeted to and fro inside a cloud of smoke and flash and shrapnel. She remembered the hardness of the wood of the trestle table under her thighs, bare legs for the spring day, the moment like lightning, when a link had flashed awake, body mind heart, and for the first time she had felt herself connected to herself.
*
My dear Riley,
What can I say to you now? I only want to say what will help to make you stronger and perhaps happy, but at the same time, if you don’t exist, then you won’t want to hear from me at all, as I will only remind you that you do exist, with a past and a future and people who love you, but then you know at heart that you do – but if you find it better for now to put away that knowledge then perhaps this isn’t the moment to mention it, so I won’t … but I WON’T send you a letter of ‘hope this finds you as it leaves us and Mother and Father send their regards’ … not to scorn the people who do that … and of course Mother and Father do send their regards, or at least I’m sure they would if I ever saw them, at least, Father would, though Mother would say – actually not say, just look, that I shouldn’t be writing to you at all – she has become more and more proper since the War began, unlike everybody else who does exactly the opposite – she lives in fear of chaos and freedom, which she thinks are the same thing, and much more dangerous than the Hun. She is hardly artistic at all any more and has taken to wearing stays again, just when everybody else is giving them up – goodness, how she would disapprove of my mentioning that – but I only see them once a week now if that and I’m not waiting till next week to write back to you just to be able to send their regards. Reading back, that doesn’t quite make sense but I think you will see what I mean.
Riley, I was so happy to hear from you, so utterly happy that I sang on the ward, and Sister gave me such a look and asked, so I had to tell her that I had had good news, that someone I feared might be lost was not lost after all – because for all you say you don’t exist and for all I respect that and your reasons for having to think it, Riley, you do! Riley exists! And that alone, dear Riley, makes me so happy that I sing. Oh, now I’ve done it –
But surely it is the really existing which will keep you sane for after it’s all over? We’ve had some shell-shock cases in here and oh, Lord, Riley, I don’t know how anyone can decide which needs to be fixed first, their broken limbs and wounds or their broken minds. I can tell you what I do: an awful lot of washing and cleaning. Piles of sheets that would stretch to Paree, dreams of wading through Keatings and Lysol … But I have two special talents: first, I speak French. So sometimes I am called from cleaning to speak French or translate something, though more often it’s talent number two: I don’t faint at blood. So I am called on to help clean up in the operating theatre, and I have seen such sights – my God, Riley – well, you will have seen them too, and at closer quarters. Why do I tell you this? Because I want you to feel a bit less alone. And it can’t go on much longer. Governments will just have to take a look at the hospitals and see straight, at what is happening, and they’ll stop.
But, Riley, while talking of feeling alone: I’m going to say this now and then I won’t mention it again – don’t you don’t you don’t you ever, ever ever again take it on yourself unilaterally to decide that you won’t let me know how things are doing with you. We were worried stupid about you. If it were allowed to be furious with a Brave Young Man Giving His All at the Front then, Riley, I am furious with you. Furious.
Yours furiously – Nadine
*
The letter was waiting on his return from the front line. It was Ferdinand, on his usual look-out for food parcels, who saw that the normally taciturn Purefoy, who got few communications and those short and from his mother, had flushed and put a letter in his pocket.
‘Got a girl, Purefoy?’ he crowed. ‘Where d’you find her? Have her send out something nice, would you?’
Locke coughed.
Ferdinand giggled, and said: ‘Oh, sorry, sir. Sir.’
‘Smarten up, Private,’ Locke said. Oh, they’ll get used to it.
‘Sir,’ said Ferdinand, and lowered his lids with a happy little gleam. He was so proud, so delighted for Purefoy he still couldn’t hide it.
Burgess was smirking.
Purefoy thought, Ah, well, that’s it for me. I am no longer what I once was.
*
He read the letter later, during a saved five minutes with a fag, knees up leaning against a trench wall leading from the pink and grey and gold dug-out with the piano. Above, on the level he associated with the past and the other world that he had found himself incapable of approaching, beyond the rim of trench life, the evening summer sun was sloping and glowing over the great flatness. In the lull before the uproar of the night, it gilded the flooded shell-holes with sudden hot, brazen surfaces, dazzling to the eye and mind. Captain Locke had something very juicy and operatic playing on his gramophone inside, a passionate aria of squeezing, rising, squeezing, rising … and then always the final falling away, the falling note … It was not the soundtrack Purefoy would have chosen.
Purefoy read the letter carefully, several times, and every now and then he closed his eyes for a moment. He thought about her hand moving across the paper, holding the pen, about whether she licked the nib still, the press of her hand on the words, her mouth, her inky hair like a Mesopotamian goddess’s, about unfinished business and the curve of her waist and how he would perfectly likely never see her again.
Her pen, he noticed, had jabbed through the paper on the last furious.
Chapter Seven
Locke Hill, Kent, December 1915
When Peter’s letter arrived, Julia was sitting in his library chair, re-reading the bulb catalogue, holding the fort. (She laughed a little at her military imagery.) Now, frost stiffened the lawn and only three icy pale roses lingered along the veranda – but she had planted next spring’s bulbs herself, wearing gloves, of course, and treating her hands afterwards with warm oil, for her hands, too, would have to be lovely for him, and, after all, Harker did the heavy work in the border. So – snowdrops for January, aconites and the astonishing miniature irises for February, daffodils, hyacinths, tulips, anemones and so on till July … the roses and shrubs would carry through … autumn crocuses; November would be a problem, unless the rudbeckia lasted, but there would be the wintersweet and holly and the Christmas roses … next Christmas! Well, it would certainly be over by then. And, anyway, there was this Christmas to think about … The image played across her mind … a wreath (made by her) … the red-berried holly, of course, and ivy; the iridescent coins of honesty seed heads, rubbed free of the little dry veily bit, to shine like pearl lustre; a little yew – or is that too funereal? He wouldn’t want that … rosemary, perhaps … and the fire crackling, the smell of the goose roasting, and champagne excoriatingly cold in the gold Viennese coupes, and the tall figure in his trenchcoat, tired and hungry, so glad to be home … Whatever time of year he might get leave, however long this terrible thing dragged on, the garden would be beautiful for him.
She read it swiftly, and telephoned at once to Rose to apply for leave from the hospital.
Four days later, two days late, Peter arrived. Julia had been standing on the doorstep patting her hair since the letter arrived – patting her hair, pinching her cheeks, and turning to check in the ormolu mirror how much older she looked since June.
‘You look beautiful,’ Rose said pityingly.
‘But I do look older,’ Julia said, with a little smile.
‘So will he,’ Rose reminded her.
It had been only ten months – they knew ten months was not very long, compared with som
e others. It wasn’t so simple that he had left a boy and returned a man, or left in the bloom of youth and returned a ruin, or that he had left a gentleman and returned a soldier. He was still twenty-seven, still six foot three, with his fine hair, and his slight stoop, his apologetic smile, his bony jaw, his blue eyes. He looked a little thin and pale – he always did. But there was a new papery tiredness on his fine skin, a new parched quality to his slenderness. Rose had to remind herself not to run to him to be the first to be embraced.
And then she had to remind herself not to look as Julia hurled herself into his arms, melted herself inside his greatcoat, her pale wool dress a streak against the darkness of his uniform like a headlight beam through night. It was as much their reunion as his return that brought a tear of relief to Rose’s eye.
*
Peter was affable, quiet, busy. He played with Max, the red setter, in the garden. He read the newspapers. He arranged to go to town for a meeting to do with Locke and Locke. He went to bed directly after dinner, and slept late in the morning.
‘That’s good, I think,’ said Rose, who had had some of the wounded from Loos in the hospital, and had listened to their nightmares and their midnight weeping. She had seen – God, hadn’t she seen! – how strange men could be when they came back from Over There.
‘What is?’ said Julia.
‘His sleeping so much.’
‘Oh, yes,’ she said.
Julia was angry, and Rose knew why. Peter was not being affectionate with her. There was no warmth in his eye. During the night Rose had heard none of the little creaks and muffled gasps that she now knew betrayed what Matron chose to call the Full Expression of Married Love.
The following morning Julia was wearing the cream dress again, which looked to Rose sacrificial.
Rose hoped things would improve after she left them alone together. ‘Be gentle with him,’ she had whispered to Julia, kissing her goodbye when she left to return to Folkestone. Julia had given her a rather amazed look. Was Rose really telling her how to behave towards a husband? Too funny.
Rose recognised the look from visiting wives at the hospital, kind, good, ignorant women with no idea what they were up against. Poor Peter, she thought.
*
Peter sat in his chair, his father’s old chair, feeling the support of familiar old cushions, the shape of them formed by the backsides of generations of Lockes of Locke Hill. His grandfather’s books stood dark on the shelves, a little gold tooling gleaming dimly here and there in the firelight. His great-grandfather’s dress sword, in its glass case, lay on the table behind the chintz sofa. Here he was, in the arms of his ancestors.
The newspaper, whose versions and analyses of the battle of Loos he did not recognise, stood as it were of its own accord, hardly needing the support of his heedless hands. He found he was blinking fast, trying to chase away images he could not live with.
‘Darling,’ said Julia. She crossed the drawing room to his chair, and made to creep into his arms, inside the newspaper. ‘Darling, we’ve hardly had a moment. How are you, my love?’
He did not know how he was. How could she expect him to know? How could she expect him to answer?
He had lost fifteen men at Loos: Burdock, Knightley, Atkins, Jones, Bloom, Bruce, Lovall, Hall, Green, Wester, Johnson, Taylor, Moles, Twyford and Merritt. The Allies had been seven to one against the Hun, and fifteen men had died under his command.
And then he had been sent home. Before he could – could what? Could be with the other survivors: huddle in a pile with them, smoking in silence, sharing air, sleeve to sleeve, being not alone. And before he could find out if fifteen was many or few – well, God, of course it was fifteen too many, but by war logic, by the bitter standards of Over There, he didn’t know if it was many or few; he didn’t know if he had done well or badly in comparison with others; he didn’t know if it was all right to ask himself that question, and he didn’t know who to ask if it was or not. He didn’t know how the boys were now. The paper told him none of this. But he saw Ainsworth’s muddied face over the rim of a shell-hole, asking him for something that he couldn’t make out, and he saw some limbs, just limbs, lying there, and Burdock, Knightley, Atkins, Jones, Bloom, Bruce, Lovall, Hall, Green, Wester, Johnson, Taylor, Moles, Twyford and Merritt were dead. His men. He thanked God for Purefoy, who turned out to have the knack as well as the guts: he knew whether or not to put a hand on a shoulder, at which moment to offer a smoke. Purefoy knew that when you had to say something, and there was absolutely nothing a man could say, it didn’t much matter what you said. Purefoy had the tone of voice. Whenever any bloody fool carped on about promotion from the ranks diluting the quality of officer stock and all that idiocy, Locke would point out Purefoy.
Julia was sitting on his lap, nestling a little, moving her lovely bottom. His arms closed around her and he dropped the paper, as she wanted. He held her. Such a little woman. She could just break. It was for her, really, all of it. To keep her safe. Not to let the Hun do to her what they’d done to Belgium.
He’d carried the boys back in bits. An armful of Atkins; Bloom’s head on his shoulder and his arm round his neck, resting like a woman’s or a tired child’s. His own long-fingered hand white against Bloom’s hair, embracing the dead head to keep it from flopping.
She was looking at him in that shy way, the up-and-under the eyelashes look. He knew what it offered.
God, he wanted to want to –
The weight of her body on him. Her arm round his neck, clinging. The flesh …
Something dug and bit in his stomach.
He managed to kiss the top of her head, as you would a child come to say goodnight. It was as much of a ‘no’ as a slap in the face.
With a tart little blink she pretended that hadn’t been the question. After a moment she got up, and went to the window, and came back and sat herself down mermaid-style at his feet, looking up at him. She said gently, ‘What can I do for you, Peter? How can I make you happy?’ At which he let out a bark of laughter, which sounded much crueller than he had intended, even to his own ears, but which he could not pull back. She winced.
Do you even read the version in the papers? he thought. Do you have the slightest idea what’s going on out there? And then stopped himself. It wasn’t her fault.
‘I only want you to be happy, darling,’ she said boldly, flinging caution to the winds.
He blinked. ‘Well, I’m afraid that’s not in your power, my dear,’ he said mildly. ‘So you’d best put it out of your mind.’
Slap, slap, slap.
She turned and went upstairs. He pushed himself out of the chair, like an old man, and poured himself a brandy from the sparkling clean, perfectly positioned decanter on the deeply polished sideboard.
*
The following morning Julia went up to London on the train. She proceeded smartly to Selfridges, where she bought herself a dim green wool dress with a wide collar and a soft V-neck, belted at the waist, and the new war-crinoline shape, flaring to her calves. It showed her narrow ankles, and it showed her throat. She bought a pair of new shoes, dainty black, almost practical, with a heel. She looked at the underwear – every time she looked in a shop they had brought out new designs. Goodness, they were pretty. Blue figured silk … but Peter had never liked the thigh-restricting corsets. She blushed, and banished the blush. That was what she was here for.
‘What’s that?’ she asked, gesturing to an unfamiliar item.
The girl gave a delicate smile. ‘It is a bust-improver, madam. The, em, moulded area increases the generosity of the form. It’s entirely invisible, of course, when worn. But not, em, something madam would be requiring.’
Goodness.
Most of the new styles were so soft and free-moving. That was all right – her breasts were still good. Weren’t they? Yes. She chose a nice light corset – no stays or any of that old-fashioned nonsense. Vogue disapproved of women wearing the new knitted-silk dancing corsets for the day. She’d read it
was daring. She felt daring. Perhaps Peter would like daring.
Then the girl showed her some beautiful silk chiffon drawers and chemises in the Oriental style. Pale green like a pistachio nut, bias cut, with a dusty pink trim. The sort of thing Vogue called: ‘Those blushing trifles that are born to blush unseen.’
So much had been unseen of late. Well. Perhaps he would look at these.
‘So pretty,’ she murmured. The drawers were tiny. They wouldn’t be the least use for everyday wear.
‘We also have this,’ said the girl, modestly. With a little flourish of her neat hands a delicate slip appeared along the counter, the same silk chiffon, with fine satin ribbons for the straps. ‘And, er …’ It was a deep-sleeved wafting boudoir gown, the same silk chiffon with devoré velvet, and a soft sash to tie it.
The girl actually stared at Julia in the changing room, her peony skin, the exquisite scraps of lingerie. Like a present wrapped only in ribbons.
Julia bought them all. And new stockings.
Christmas Eve, by the cruel requirements of the regiment, was his last night. After their delicious, elegant, slightly formal dinner, over which Julia had taken considerable trouble, she said she would go to bed early, and she kissed Peter sweetly as she went, not saying she was tired, or had a headache, or anything.
She had a bath: not too hot, to make her flesh red. Not too much jasmine oil. She had hoped he would come up while she was in it, shoulders emerging prettily from the water, but never mind, because after drying herself, perched on the edge of the bed, she put on the lovely new things. She had never worn anything so racy. Did they look too dreadful, in this country bedroom? Did they look ridiculous on her?
A horrible thought struck her – it was her. Her.
I’m losing it. Bloom.
Old. Fat. Wrinkles.
No-o-o, she told herself. He loves you. The … marital side … has always been … a joyous … and it will be again. You’re doing the right thing.
