by Louisa Young
Julia had been brought up ignorant of … the marital side, until at the last minute her mother had said: ‘There is something unpleasant to which a wife has to submit.’ But her mother had been wrong about it, so wrong.
Julia was quite cold when Peter finally came upstairs.
He’d brought his book.
He didn’t go and shave.
In the middle of the night he groaned, and rolled over, and clutched her wildly, scarily. For a moment she was glad, and tried to return what she hoped was his embrace – but it wasn’t. It was more like a kind of fit – horrible, quick, desperate, violent. She found herself stiff with shock beneath him, suffocated by his chest on her face, her breasts painfully squashed, almost twisted. He didn’t seem to be either awake or asleep and, for the first time, she understood what her mother had meant.
She lay rigid and furious at the edge of her bed, the white-sheeted side of the mattress like a cliff falling away beneath her. His hot body spread across the whole territory; she couldn’t bear to let it touch her. She could feel its heat, and quivered.
You were not meant to be angry with a serving soldier (but she was) …
She had wanted him to make love to her (but not like that) …
His leave was so short (and so horrible) …
They’d been awfully lucky to get leave over actual Christmas (and, to be brutal, she wished he hadn’t come) …
They had been so happy, before he had gone away to protect her. Well, that was pretty damn ironic, wasn’t it?
He left the next afternoon.
‘Well,’ Julia said, pale in the frosty air, ‘Happy Christmas!’ She kissed him sharply on each cheek, and turned away, clicking her heels on the black and white floor to go and sit by the fire.
‘Goodbye, my dear,’ he said, very quietly. He was so very tall.
*
Rose, who had been unable to get away from the hospital again, came the following week on her afternoon off. Julia told her, fussing over tea in the little sitting room at Locke Hill, that she was thinking of training as an ambulance driver and going to France.
‘They only take ladies of good family,’ she said. ‘It was in the paper.’ She patted around her on the sofa, searching ineffectually. ‘Look, here it is … and I really can’t,’ she said, ‘just keep on hanging around. I really want to be in it, doing my bit.’
Rose smiled. Hamlet’s line, ‘Nothing is good or bad but thinking makes it so’, came to mind. Julia seemed to have a natural talent for deciding, unilaterally, that something was or was not the case. She could, by changing her emotional lighting, block out a disquieting incident and ignore lines or passages of dialogue. She could, by approaching from a different angle, translate and transmute until history was rewritten and maps redrawn. It was not conscious. Filters roamed her mind, and memory slid this way and that, like stage flats, not so much at her bidding but at the call of her emotional necessity. A bad cake could be lathered with whipped cream and raspberries, and called the latest French Fancy, a recipe from Lady Panton. A moth-eaten jacket became a reason for a lovely shopping spree. Peter had told Rose once that he saw this as an optimistic knack, useful in times of minor difficulty. It was one of the things which made him think that despite her great beauty she would be a good wife.
‘I could do that, couldn’t I?’
Rose wondered if Julia’s mother had been in touch. Mrs Orris was a flag-waving committee-running powerhouse, a mistress of getting other people Over There, a firm believer in one big push and embarrassed, Rose felt, by the lack of sacrificial instinct in her own daughter. The daughter of a friend of hers had actually been killed by a shell on a field hospital, and she wouldn’t shut up about it. Rose saw that Mrs Orris, having no son to offer up to glory, would rather thrill to an equivalent sacrifice.
‘Other girls are Over There,’ Julia continued. ‘My mother …’
Ah, yes.
‘… she would much prefer it if I were … and I would be nearer him …’ She tailed off. She still loved him. Why was she even thinking that insidious word ‘still’? It had been a bad leave. These things happen. Mrs Bax had been quite vocal about how dreadful things had been with her son Freddie. Julia knew it was her duty to make the leave, and Peter’s behaviour, acceptable. She tried, very hard, recasting it this way and that in her mind. She terribly wanted to do her duty. But when her only desire was to do all that was required of a wife, he had rejected her over and over. She couldn’t do anything for him. He didn’t want her. And then he insulted her.
The situation was irreconcilable. But she had to reconcile it. It was her duty. He was her husband. He was protecting them.
She turned to Rose. ‘I need to do something,’ she said. It was genuine plea.
Rose assumed this was a display of wishful thinking from Julia.
‘You faint at the sight of a steering wheel,’ she pointed out. She didn’t care to enter into the many other reasons why this was a ludicrous idea. Nothing would come of it anyway. Sometimes it seemed as if Julia had somewhere acquired vouchers for extra attention. As if they had come free with the silver-blonde hair and the rosy mouth. And when nobody else was there, Rose was meant to redeem them, once a week over tea. Rose, being single, a foreigner to marital complexity and of independent cast, had no idea what war – or society – required of a wife. She thought Julia was being banal.
‘Well, I’m sure you think it’s time I toughened up,’ Julia said. ‘I know my mother does.’
Rose thought it was time Julia’s mother shut up. Julia’s mother had never, to Rose’s knowledge, uttered a single opinion that she hadn’t received from elsewhere, had never said a single thing that she hadn’t read in the paper that week or heard over some cup of self-important tea. And irritating though Julia could be, Rose held that she was sweet-natured and pretty-faced and that one of the many injustices of the war – a small one, in the big scheme, but still – was how the sweet-natured pretty-faced daughters of England were required to toughen up. A girl like Julia wasn’t made for it. Why should she have to?
How do we learn it? Rose wondered. If I knew, I could save people the trouble of having to learn it directly – but I only know that one day you wake without weeping, and you look the unbearable in the eye and you bear it, but hold on to the compassion. Without actual feeling. Can you do that? And remain useful?
Then could you clear away those amputated limbs?
Rose had seen girls – nurses, VADs, ambulance drivers – working in France, existing in what she now saw was a state of constant shock. She had briefly shared the long, cruel hours and the vehicles awash with gangrenous blood and bits of limb and coughed-up scraps of greyish-yellow gassed lung, which had to be hosed out every morning. She had both envied and feared the girls who dealt with that, and when she caught a fever two months in she had come home thankfully, and taken up her duties again at the milder level of the hospitals on this side of the Channel. And that had been a year ago … What state were those girls in now?
‘I’m not sure ambulance-driving would be right for you,’ said Rose.
‘You don’t think I could do it, do you?’ Julia said tightly.
Rose tried to produce, at the drop of the hat, some kind of expression that would not be interpreted as patronising. It wasn’t possible, of course, because she was being patronising. She had patronised Julia for years. It was her compensation for Julia’s beauty and good marriage.
‘I think,’ Rose said, ‘there are better uses for your talents.’
‘What talents?’ said Julia. ‘The only talent I have is for looking nice and there are no men here to look at me and I’m getting old!’
‘You’re younger than me,’ said Rose, mildly.
‘You know what I mean,’ said Julia.
Rose did know what she meant. She meant Rose was not a beauty, so it didn’t matter for her.
Rose kept a mental list of the tiny changes the war was making, which no one was bothering to record because of the hugene
ss of everything:
1) That the shame of her not being married was dissolving and disappearing as if it had never existed.
2) That she was no longer required to make herself available as a potential wife, and she was liberated from the discomforts, hypocrisies and embarrassments which that had caused.
3) Ambition. The fact that she could have it at all. Just that.
She added this one:
4) Before the war, what Julia had just said would have been a great insult. Now it had to be seen as a trifle.
*
Peter returned to France in a state of layered horror at himself, each layer leaping in turns over the other to occupy the front of his mind. One layer was fifteen dead men, two of them still in his arms, their dead limbs heavier every night. The other was that he had allowed those fleshly ghosts to cause such filthy behaviour to his wife, the woman he was meant to cherish; that he had upset her, then leapt on her like an animal; that she had been unable to look at him the following morning, only turning to him long enough to show a pale, puffy face and blaming eyes. He had been unable to find enough love or energy within himself to put this right in the time available and had left her waving at the door, her hand automatic, her eyes hideous with confusion and loss. He had been filled with useless pain about the horrible realisation that flesh, all flesh, even her flesh, was bloody meat, as cold and hideous as Atkins’s heavy cold leg and Bloom’s damp white brow and the French boy under the duckboards. All the way to Dover her thigh and young Atkins’s made an irresistible flickering exchange of images, like a magic lantern, a film show gone wrong, a dismembered can-can.
Crossing the Channel, the froideur with Julia began to diffuse in the roar of responsibility, in the grand shared mentality of soldiers. By the time he was back with the regiment it had frozen and slipped down the back, suspended like those little creatures that live in ice, waiting for the sun and the thaw before they can grow, or feed, or blossom.
And then Julia sent him a letter, at the beginning of February, quite different in tone both from the repetitive lines of wilful cheer to which he had grown accustomed, and from anything he felt he deserved to receive.
My darling Peter –
We have such a lovely Valentine’s surprise! So little, I think, my love, have we expected such a blessing that it seems we had forgotten all about it, and so strange it must seem to you – it seems so strange to me, even here, so how it will sound to you, so far away from anything to do with— Oh, my darling husband, I never thought I would have to write such news in a letter and now that I do have to I almost don’t know how to phrase it. Well – here goes! I am to have a baby. We are to have a baby. Dr Tayle has been, and it is quite definite, and everything is as it should be, so – ! So what do you think of that? He – I am quite sure he is a boy, though I haven’t a clue why! – is due at the end of September, so I am now thinking, Oh, let him be a child of peace, let everything be over by then, and let him enter into a new and better world, with his papa right by to welcome him and love him every day of his little life, and no more separation. My darling, won’t that be grand? Won’t we be the most wonderful parents? And if by some unholy bad fortune everything is not over by then, well, the moment the world looks on our lovely baby she will realise the error of her ways, and make peace happen just for the sake of his lovely blue eyes – for he will have blue eyes, and he will be lovely, and can we call him Harry? My darling, I am going to post this now so that I know you have the news, at least, and I will write you more and longer soon, this evening probably, as Dr Tayle says I am to rest, which I read as meaning I do not have to go and play bridge with Mrs Bax – hurrah! – but must stay home and write to dear you instead. So please, my darling, write back to me as soon as you can and tell me all that you think, and if you like the name – Harry Locke – Harold Locke – I feel it sounds very English and good, a son to be proud of. I feel completely fine by the way, only a tiny bit sick in the mornings and Millie – who knows all about it as the oldest of eight! – provides me with an arrowroot biscuit the night before, the secret is to eat it while you are still lying down and there will be no sickness. And it works. So I must rush to give this to Harker to put in the post and please please write to me by return. I shall wait for your letter, longing to know how you feel and wishing so much we could be together for this special wonderful blessed moment!
My darling – all the love in the world is coming to you,
from your loving wife, your Julia
The letter made no sense to him. For a moment he thought it a mistake, somebody else’s letter delivered in error. Then he thought there must have been a biological mistake: surely such relations as he had inflicted on his wife that night were not – could not – well, of course they could. Why should they not? The emotions involved had no role in biological efficacy.
It was a punishment. He would look at his firstborn son, and see his own behaviour.
And his wife! Her utter sweetness! To overlook the circumstances of conception, and come forwards with such loving, loyal, forgiving …
Either that or she was mad.
‘Anything wrong, sir?’ said the young adjutant, lurking in the doorway of the dug-out.
‘Apparently I’m to be a father,’ said Locke, confused, the words sticky in his mouth. He had seen animals being born. Blood, slime, split flesh.
‘Congratulations, sir!’ said the adjutant, who was nineteen and a virgin, and to whom the words meant very little.
Chapter Eight
London, April 1916
Riley Purefoy was walking across Kensington Gardens in the sun, coming up from Victoria station, going home. He hadn’t been in London for two years. It seemed very peculiar to him. There were no shells going off. No one was shooting. No gas-gong. No sergeants shouting. Firm clean ground underfoot. No corpses, no wounds, no huddled smoking men, no sweet stink of blood, no star shells waving beautifully through the sky. It was quiet. There were women. He was clean and dry in the flea-free uniform he had had pressed and steamed at the hotel in Dover. God, how shamelessly he appreciated the advantages of being an officer. It was worth all the little sneers in the mess, the sideways glances from aetiolated toff twats, the dumb attempts at mockery from chinless boys whose pubescent moustaches and public-school slang did not, it turned out, make them natural leaders of men. He fully intended to buy himself some decent-quality puttees, now that he was allowed such freedoms, and to have done for ever with the annoying little thin ones.
Coming up towards the Round Pond, the centre of the world, he stared at it for a moment, banished the image of sunset-flooded shell-holes, and lay down on his back on the grass. He’d heard there were show trenches in Kensington Gardens, so people at home could share their boys’ experience. Burgess had laughed like a drain, reading out their beauties as described in the paper.
He stared at the sky. No one told him to do anything, or needed him to tell them what to do. Some children came and giggled at him and very quietly he asked himself, in the quiet, Are you there? Riley? Are you still there?
He knew that to lure himself from the protected depths back into the light of day was a dangerous idea, because he would have to dismiss himself again, send it back, in only six days. He didn’t know if it would be a route to mental safety or to madness. Too much of that damn word. The papers going on about shell-shock – was it physical, was it mental, were only naturally degenerate characters susceptible to it? – how the ranks got hysteria but officers got neurasthenia … even the madness is divided by class … Men who’d gone off shell-shocked or neurasthenic reappearing at the front, cured … talking, one or two of them, of psychiatrists, electric treatment, hypnosis … Patch ’em up and send ’em back …
Riley thought it a miracle that everybody hadn’t gone mad.
Ainsworth said they should count how many northerners were shell-shocked versus the southerners, because the front was not that different from home for the northerners. Slag heaps, explosions, screaming met
al, fire and iron, digging, being ordered about. Ainsworth had had leave. Three days. It took two days just to get from Ypres to Wigan. He left the moment he was dismissed, didn’t stop to change or bathe, might even have made it in time only the conductor on the tram in Manchester had put him off, saying: ‘I’m not having you on my tram, covered in fleas.’ So Ainsworth had got off and walked, and taken the liberty of spending one evening with his children and one night with Sybil, and then he’d gone back and been marked AWOL, and Riley had been able by the judicious use of silence to lose the procedures of the incident.
Riley lay. Some birds were singing. Pigeons cooing: poo poo, poo poo, poo. Always five. It was just about here that he had lain the night before he joined up, in the English rain, all night, after running out on Terence, and his coat still sodden at the recruiting station the next evening … and not telling Nadine he was going. Just leaving that note.
What a fool he had been about Terence. Of all the things that can happen to a man’s body, to make such a fuss about someone putting their mouth on part of it …
No, that wasn’t quite right.
What if it had been a woman? That would have been wrong too … for him. As wrong? No. He knew lots of the boys pleasured each other, preferred on some un-thought-out level to be … physically affectionate … with their fellow soldiers than with grubby whores. Because there is love there, with your brothers, and loyalty, and the same desperation. Every man wants something, but plenty don’t want to want what they want. Plenty more desperately want to want, but they can’t get it up. And thinking they’ll go to Hell for any of it … He recalled Ainsworth laughing at that: ‘We’re in Hell now! And you’re right – doubtless it’s because we’ve had a wank or two.’
Thoughts of a wank. Thoughts of Nadine.
He rolled over on to his front, nose in the grass. Stop it.
I am going to do all the right things for that woman from now on.
