‘We were happy,’ she said, stubbornly. ‘We were happy in Venice, and we were happy that night at the Marsham-Townsends’, when we walked by the tennis court … my twenty-fifth birthday. And I was happy when you proposed to me …’
He lifted his mind. He had been thinking about the Trojan War; specifically about when mighty Achilles’ beloved friend Patroclus was killed in battle; about Achilles’ grief, how he locked himself away in his tent, went rather mad really, seeing ghosts and so on. He cut all his hair off, even though he’d promised it to a river god in exchange for a safe return home after the war. He’d refused to fight, though he was the greatest of the Greek heroes, and without him to lead them, the entire army lost faith, and every man in it was at risk. It was as if he no longer cared for his country, or for his leaders, or for his fellow soldiers – he only cared for his one friend. Peter had been thinking, is there an inherent contradiction in hating war and honouring soldiers? And then his mind had flung him back into thinking about soldiers. Dead ones. Loos and the Somme.
So with considerable effort, and for her sake, he lifted his mind from all that, and manoeuvred it round to Venice, and that night at the Marsham-Townsends’, and when he proposed to her. He remembered, for a moment, speaking to her appalling mother, and wondering what her father had been like. He tried to remember why he had proposed to her. Because we danced so well together – was that all? No. Because she was so beautiful? Yes – and … because she was so nice. She was soft, and gave kind advice. I was always pleased to see her when I turned up somewhere, and she was there. She was kind when my father died. All very straightforward, really. And I felt very tall with her on my arm.
All right, then. Yes, back in Arcadia, we were happy.
And at the thought of happiness, remembered happiness, his mind panicked and scattered: pure fear. He closed his eyes, clenched his mind, to hold on.
Hold on to your mind, he whispered to himself. Hold on. You’re tied to the mast. All right.
All right.
Now say something nice to the poor woman. Go on.
He couldn’t.
*
Julia tried to remember herself before she knew him. Desperate to please, obedient, bossed and squashed by her mother at every turn, her dear dad only a memory. She had realised the game early: the sweeter and prettier she was, the nicer people were to her.
And then there was Peter. How glad she had been to run to him, his amusement, his kindness.
To her, that night at the Marsham-Townsends’ sprang out, glistening with verisimilitude. She smelt the orange-flower water, saw the sheen of starch on the gentlemen’s shirt fronts, heard the waltz, felt the brush even of the palm-frond against her bare white shoulder and her skirts swirling at her ankles, as Peter wheeled her out on to the terrace, whispering – what had he whispered? Something mischievous.
Her mother had been delighted to give her to a man with a big house.
After they were married he’d said: ‘Let’s not have children immediately. Let’s run around and have some fun first.’ She had no idea there could be any choice – she’d known nothing about anything loving, about being on the same side with someone, and being happy together. Then suddenly there it was: she and Peter, together. Yes, happy!
*
He caught sight of her by the mirror in the hall. She was glancing at herself as he glanced at her. Her eyes fell away from her own taut reflection.
She did that, he thought, to her own face, to be more beautiful, because she thought I loved her for her beauty. She thought it would help. She thought that I, while fighting the bloody war, losing men, Atkins Lovall Bloom Jones oh stop it STOP IT – was most bothered by some idea that my beautiful wife was not beautiful enough. Somehow, apparently, evidently, I let her think that. Though, dear God, I do not understand why anybody would think that washing their face in carbolic acid was going to help anything. But – bad husband – I failed to protect her from this bizarre idiocy of her own. Just as I failed – bad soldier – to protect my men. Both at home and at the Front, I failed. And I wonder if anybody else on this earth can see that she is a casualty of that war just as much as Riley, or me …
*
The next time she came to lean against his door jamb, he got in first. He pulled his jacket around him, pursed his mouth against the shallow pattering of his heart, and said: ‘None of this is your fault.’
Think about her. Hold on to that. Poor Julia. Really. Poor tiresome bloody woman. ‘I don’t know why you put up with me,’ he said. And I don’t. You don’t have the first idea why I behave so bloody badly. ‘You’ve always done everything you should.’
He looked at her – eyes only, not turning his head – and he saw that she was, with a hopeless inevitability, taking these unexpected kind words at face value and investing them with huge meaning.
Oh, God.
She burst into tears.
Say something.
Not ‘fuck off’. Don’t say that.
‘Oh, Julia,’ he said, trying to buy time, to hold his mind, to make it all go away. ‘I think it’s probably too late for us. I’m an awful crock. But,’ – and here, desperate, he said the only thing which ever stopped her from looking so bloody tragic all the time – ‘I could perhaps not drink so much.’
‘I would like that,’ she said, and he saw the sudden whirling desperate hope erupting inside her. It filled him with despair.
Jesus Christ, Julia, he thought. I will never make you happy. You never will be happy! You’ve ruined your famous beauty, for me – poor fool! I’m a lush and no one else will want you. There is no chance for you now, shackled to me. And yet look at you, all hopeful – dear God, what a woman – let’s make you smile. Perhaps I can make you smile …
‘Well, I’ll give it a go,’ he said. ‘Perhaps I might – should I? Go to one of those places.’ I could do that. Could I? His heart was still going in that sick-making way – too quick and light, and all over the place.
‘Oh, please!’ she cried, too keenly. Clearly she had been about to say, ‘Oh no, of course not!’ when she thought: Yes! Grab the chance!
She’s awfully keen to be rid of me, he thought. And who can blame her?
And I’ve overdone it. I can’t do that.
But she was smiling at him, limp and tearful. ‘Oh, darling,’ she said, and corrected herself, quickly: ‘Oh, Peter.’
She looks happy. Dear God, I’ve made her happy! It’s so easy. But I can only do it by lying.
So lie. You owe her that.
Anyway, you lie to yourself all the time.
She was saying she would find someone, she would ask Rose, she was certain things could be better, she was so glad. She jumped up and went off to get on with it all.
Oh, Jesus.
In the course of the rest of the day he drank almost half a bottle of whisky and two bottles of wine. ‘Final fling,’ he said cheerfully. Julia beamed at him, the tight smile of her skin lit from within by a genuine if bewildered hope.
Keep away from me, he thought. Just keep away from me.
Chapter Three
Locke Hill, March–April 1919
To Rose it looked nothing like a fling. It looked like desperate unhappiness, i.e. business as usual.
The newlyweds heading off into eternal nuptial joy meant that Rose was now on her own with the two ghouls, the two fluttering, ragged banners gloriously emblazoned, in Rose’s eyes, with her failure to save them. Peter and Julia lurched through her days and tagged across her mind, united in bitterness, loss and the seeming impossibility of redemption. Frankly, Rose preferred being at work with Major Gillies at the Queen’s Hospital, looking after the facial injury patients. There at least the men were getting better, and moving on, or they were dying – but at least they were not stuck on a ghastly merry-go-round of their own making, with so little idea how they got on, and no idea how to get off. Not that I know any better, Rose thought. It’s just that I can see their every mistake – the ones they’ve made an
d the ones they’re still making.
Peter did not go somewhere. The idea of ‘going somewhere’ dissolved with the daylight: he would not go somewhere because, it turned out, the places he might go required him not to drink at all. He seemed to think alcohol was a balanced diet – untouched trays went in and out of the study, where he sat with the blind half down, reading his Homer. Rose would stick her head in, calling him old bean, trying to tempt him out with walnut cake (they had to chase every scrap of food into him), and minding so much that he didn’t seem to mind when she treated him like a schoolboy. And equally untouched trays went up and down the stairs to Julia, who went up to bed and stayed there, ‘resting’, later and later in the mornings, longer and longer hours, the room over-warm and the curtains half open, promising that she would really try, about the getting up. Oh the curtains – Millie the housemaid trying to open them, in the interests of fresh air and health and doing as Rose had instructed her, and Julia telling her not to, and Millie, disgruntled, leaving them hanging as nobody wanted them: half open, limp, unconvincing, unconvinced. Slatternly. Millie had been a pest ever since having to come back into service, after being sacked from Elliman’s for flirting with the foreman. It wasn’t Rose’s job to hire and fire, any more than it was to look after Peter and Julia – but when a vacuum develops in a household, someone like Rose, with her strong hands and her clear eyes, cannot help but fill it.
And into this dim stuffy room Eliza would take Tom, where Julia would cry on him, and make him lie down beside her, and stroke his head, and say: ‘Oh Tom, Tom, what is to become of you?’
Was it just that socks needed pulling up? Was it some kind of shock, some nerve condition? Were they ill, or not? Dr Tayle said rest, exercise, exercise, rest, fresh air, good food, rest … Dr Tayle seemed to think if Peter could be made to walk Max every day, everything would be all right. But Peter didn’t care for Max any more, and anyway Max was always curled up on Julia’s bed, adding to the fetid smell up there of hormones and old Malmaison, and leaving silky red hairs all over the silky orange cushions. Of course Peter was unhappy, but he wasn’t wounded – the limp from his leg wound from the Somme was hardly perceptible – and he didn’t seem to be sick. There were no particular signs of shell shock – so what was it?
He needs to see a proper doctor! she thought. But he refused to see even Dr Tayle.
And anyway, Rose had her own work. Today had been particularly demanding: two skin flaps had failed, one fellow – borderline already – had had a full-on attack of hysteria, in front of the entire ward, and another had moved from what had been a small infection into life-threatening sepsis, and Major Gillies had actually shouted at Sister Black about hygiene – unimaginable! the idea that he would shout, or that Sister Black would let standards slip. While there were no new patients as such, thank God, there were still men coming through from other hospitals with badly healed facial injuries, or badly done sew-ups or attempts at reconstruction – which were worse, because of having to tell them they need to go through it all again – or worse still, that they can’t – and the men’s disappointment … But they were getting there. If the end wasn’t in sight, at least there were no more new beginnings.
She was pushing her bicycle up the lane and into the shed, wishing that Nadine was there to talk to about it. Or Riley. She missed their good sense and their humour – it was all so bloody tragic round here! But she would hardly write to them while they were on honeymoon: ‘Sorry to tear you from your bliss; can I moan on a bit more about my cousin and his wife?’ If they think of us at all it would be to give thanks to the Lord above that they’re not still stuck here with us, she thought. They’ve escaped. They’re not really anything to us any more. Or perhaps they are. But they’re not family. They’re not responsible like I am. She realised she didn’t know what wartime friendship meant, now that war was gone. Would we even have met, without the war?
It all brought up again a question that had been bothering Rose for a while. Her big question. Should she leave Locke Hill? She’d stayed – had special permission, even, to move out from the nurses’ residence at the Queen’s Hospital – in order to help them all. Her former patient, Riley; exhausted Nadine, back from nursing in France; poor sick Julia; shattered Peter … But now that Riley and Nadine were married and gone, and order – well – order was meant to be being restored to the world, did Peter and Julia need their own house back just for themselves and Tom? Because ideas had been emerging even in reliable Rose, over the dark winter, and – not that she could think of mentioning it – she very much wanted to leave. Throughout the war she’d given her donkey work to the hospital, and her affection to Peter and Julia, Riley and Nadine, Tom. Now, her intellect was dragging its nails down the walls of her captivity, demanding its turn. Thirty-two years old, a virgin, an old maid, and likely to remain so.
In other words, free.
She pictured Riley and Nadine – or tried to – but as she had never been to the south of France she didn’t have much to go on. Their one postcard (Nadine’s writing: ‘Missing you! (well, not really!)’) showed slender palm trees along a curving road and a curving beach. It was apparently a corniche. She remembered eating cornichons once or twice in France: same shape! Someone had told her – Peter, it must have been – that the word came from ‘horn’ … She pictured Riley and Nadine on a curving beach, eating tiny gherkins, with tiny horns growing out from their foreheads through their curly black hair. They would be wet and happy from the sea, young and beautiful—
She found herself suddenly blushing. She knew perfectly well what Riley’s body looked like, from nursing him. But he was a married man, not a patient, and she was no longer his nurse.
*
Rose spoke to Julia about Peter. ‘I do think,’ said Rose, ‘that he might see a more … sophisticated doctor.’
‘Is he ill?’ said Julia. ‘Do you really think so?’ She perked up at the idea. Of course she would, thought Rose. Illness is something you could do something about. Illness is a reason.
‘Worth checking,’ said Rose, and, nourished by this new possibility, Julia agreed to get up after all. Rose’s constant concern was whether Peter was sticking to the new rule – Dubonnet instead of whisky, and not until six o’clock – and how one could civilly find out, without provoking a small English furore.
‘You don’t trust me, Rosie darling, do you?’ he’d say, politely, glittering, and she’d say, ‘Oh Peter, it’s not that …’
And then one morning he interrupted the regular cycle of this dull and dangerous conversation to shout at her, suddenly, ferociously: ‘Then what is it? I tell you what it is – it’s a pretty sorry state of affairs, Cousin Rose, if a man can’t have a glass of whisky in his own study, in his own house …’ – and Rose stood, pinioned, shocked – ‘without some bloody woman—’ And he stopped as suddenly as he had started, and cocked his head, and then turned and looked at her as if he had no idea where he was.
*
Rose had a secret.
She and Nadine had talked, during the winter, about how a nurse could be, when returned to her family. For Nadine, who had only been a nurse at all because of the war, who hadn’t been one for very long, who had hardly seen her wounded hero during her nursing days, and who would never be a nurse again if she could help it, the issue was how to avoid nurseyness in marriage to a physically damaged man. Nurse and patient was not a model of marriage to which she aspired, and she believed they could avoid it.
For Rose, it was quite different. Nursing was taking her in more and more. It had given her a function where she had had none, an outlet for the natural love she carried but for which she had had no object – no man, no child, no art or passion beyond her deep affection for her once-glamorous cousin Peter, with his clever brain and the sweetness he always shown her, and his mild, elegant manners. And of course she was fond of Tom. It had turned out to be easy enough for her to be competent in caring for both of them, and Julia. Looking after people was going to
be her life now. She accepted it and was looking forward to it. But not domestic. Healing, not tending. Science, not soup. She wanted more. She wanted, among other things, to know what was wrong with Peter. She had plans.
In February, Rose had received a letter from Lady Ampthill of the Voluntary Aid Detachment Committee.
Devonshire House, London W1
Dear Madam,
On behalf of the Joint Committee of the British Red Cross and the Order of St John of Jerusalem, I have the honour to ask you to fill up the enclosed ‘Scholarship Scheme Form’ if you wish to train for definite work after demobilisation. The Joint Societies have decided to give a sum of money for scholarships and training, as a tribute to the magnificent work so generously given by VAD Members during the War.
Training will be given for those professions for which the work done by members would make them particularly suitable, such as the Health Services or Domestic Science. A preliminary list is appended, with the approximate period of training and probable salary to be gained when fully trained.
A limited number of scholarships to cover the fee and cost of living will be given to those who pass the qualifying examinations with special proficiency, but in other cases it is hoped to assist materially those members who wish to be trained for their various professions in centres all over the country.
The work of VAD Members is beyond all praise, and we very much hope that they will again be leaders in important patriotic work, which equally demands the best of British womanhood.
Yours faithfully
MARGARET AMPTHILL
Chairman, Joint Women’s VAD Committee.
Rose read it carefully. A woman – Lady Ampthill – was writing to her, a woman, offering money, training and support. She read the final sentence three times: the words leader, important, best, work, and womanhood in the same sentence. This, Rose thought, was the most beautiful letter she had ever received. (Not the most beautiful she had ever read – those were Nadine’s letters to Riley while he was in hospital, which Rose had had to read to him – my gosh, they had been something.) But no – this was about a future in which she could see herself. This was like Madame Curie setting up x-ray labs in the Belgian field hospitals, and fixing the wiring while she was at it, and rigging up field telephones. This was potentially …
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