And he did, thinking about the Augean Stables. For weeks.
At a meeting in late February, Uncle Eric suggested that new stationery might be in order, as the old was looking rather fusty. New world, new times, and so on. That afternoon Peter, without consulting or budgeting, chose a design, approved it and ordered a large consignment.
‘But why waste time?’ he said. ‘You said it needed doing; I did it.’
The next day he sacked the assistant, who was, unbeknownst to Peter, the son of Uncle Eric’s mistress. ‘He wasn’t helping me,’ Peter protested. ‘I don’t need an assistant. I don’t need help. I know you resent paying the doorman extra – so we can save money here. And I’m up to date on the contracts now, so I’ve an idea or two for this year and next …’
Uncle Eric suggested that Peter, with his academic and archival talents, might like to have a go at applying his new filing system to the old pre-war archive, which was kept in the Birmingham office.
Peter smiled his distant, charming smile, and felt himself drifting away, back, back, blown by winds he could not control.
Uncle Eric, without telling Peter, rehired the assistant to go through and check everything that Peter had recently refiled.
*
A few times during February and March, while he was trying to be civil in town, returning each night to Locke Hill or Chester Square, Peter was asked by someone or other at his club what he was up to now; or his mother would telephone from Scotland, inviting him to visit and wanting to know how he was. He actually could not say that Locke & Locke had rejected him. And of course they hadn’t. They still paid him. He still had a desk, in his oppressive office. If he went in, which he didn’t much, Uncle Eric would enquire mildly about the archive in Birmingham – to which Peter never went. Other than that, they didn’t say anything.
‘I know what’s happening here,’ Peter told the barman at the club, politely. ‘I’m HMS Iolaire. Two hundred men after four years of war, shipwrecked and dead on the shore of their childhood home, their families waiting on shore to welcome them. Like Odysseus’ last boat, when the crew let all the winds out of the sack just as they reached Ithaca, and the storms blew them away. For another ten years. Nearly home, starting to relax, and your own damn folly sends you back out there. I do understand. I really do.’
The barman wiped the glasses.
*
Sometimes, when he caught sight of Julia from behind, in a doorway, or when the dog bounced up to him, his tail high and feathery and hopeful, Peter would be struck with a poignant scrap of … something … a little taste in his mouth of how things used to be – of how I used to be – and then he could almost see a thin skein of desire strung across some part of his being, a high wire, a cobweb, invisible except in certain lights when it might flicker, or glisten, inaccessible, and he would imagine for a moment that if he could only reach that evanescent, tiny wire, and somehow take hold of it, follow it, walk along it, even, balance on it over the void, through this chasm, then it would take him … somewhere … somewhen? No such word. There should be.
He used to like the dog so much. No more. Dirty creatures. Eating God knows what they found in the fields.
That winter he and Riley had walked out on the Downs, in the brisk wind which, as it made conversation impossible, was appropriate to their shared silence about their shared experience. Once or twice, he had felt a wild urge to tell Riley about the dreams where summer rain turned into blood, the dead men, the cheap women, the drink and the shame. He had wanted to tell him that he could not continue to sleep with his wife because the weight of her body beside his was that of the dying Hun boy in the shell crater, and he could not make love to his wife because the feeling of her body in his arms was – not even was like, but was – Bloom’s corpse, which he was carrying in. Bloom, Burdock, Knightley, Atkins, Jones … Remember Jones? He looked like a sausage – well, he did! A big raw pink sausage. And then in the summer –’17? – he got sunburn, and he looked like a half-cooked sausage. And Burdock – was it Burdock? – joked about wanting to leave him out in the sun to cook all the way through, so they could eat him. (And Burdock had pulled Jones’ corpse in, and someone had said: ‘He’s all yours now, Birdy, cook him however you like.’ And the next day Burdock caught it himself. Or so we assumed, because no one ever saw him again. Though Smiler Rogers saw some guts and a bit of fair hair.)
He wanted to tell Purefoy about the dying German boy.
‘Captain,’ he murmured, on one occasion, but Riley, when he caught the military word, shot him a look, and Peter could say nothing.
He was quite certain that Riley had things he wasn’t saying either. They were both able to take a bit of comfort from leaving it at that.
And in between his dreams of Loos and the Somme and the eighteen hours in the shell hole and the weight of Bloom’s head on his shoulder, Peter would sometimes dream that he had gone on holiday, taken a train, and stepped off at a quiet station where the sign on the platform read, clearly, 1912, and Julia and Max were there, and they were all happy, and they came in a motorcar back to this same house, this same house where he had been a boy, and ate scones with jam.
Even in this dream he did not feel safe. He felt safe only when passed out: feeling nothing.
Sometimes when he awoke Tom would be standing by him, clear blue eyes watching.
Chapter Five
France, April 1919
Riley was out in the world again, and Nadine was terrified for him. She was scared for him being in France again – but it was so different here in the south, he said. Even the language, they agreed, did not sound like the French they had heard in the north. He could feel as if they were in a different country: this sun, these astonishing colours. Olive trees, lizards, lavender. It was nothing like – there. And she knew that to be true.
Peter had insisted on giving Riley and Nadine the honeymoon as a wedding present (despite Riley’s reluctance to accept gifts, which he maintained despite Nadine’s desire that he relax about money). Peter had always been rather sentimental about his own honeymoon (probably it was the last time he and Julia were really happy, Nadine thought. Perhaps the only time). A little hotel in Bandol had been organised for them.
They arrived at night, rattling from the station under a black starless sky, and with no idea of surroundings other than smells – jasmine, pine – and sounds – rattling harness, creaking wheels, the bizarre orchestra of cicadas. In the morning, Nadine threw open the shutters of the cool dim bedroom, and when she saw the beauty that was before her – the radiant glory of blue dancing sea, green musing pines and golden glowing sunshine – she burst into tears.
Riley rolled over. ‘What is it?’ he called, alarmed.
‘I’m alive,’ she said. ‘To see this. Look at it. Look. All this was going on all the time we were so bleak.’
*
They ate fish and fennel, smelt mimosa – what a miracle that was – and sweet broom and salt. They swam in the spring-fresh sea. Nadine bought Riley a fisherman’s shirt and, it turned out, developed freckles on her nose and forehead. The hotel had a small boat in which they paddled up the calanques in search of kingfishers and turtles and flamingoes. Over and over they found themselves grinning and gasping over something lovely. The scarf that constantly lay double-coiled around Riley’s chin or throat began to be left to hang in a single drape, relaxed, protecting only the back of his neck from sunburn, not his scars and his dignity from the eyes of strangers.
In the cafés, at first, she ordered for him. She explained exactly what she wanted: the bouillabaisse, strained, with extra cream; the boeuf stroganoff very tender, the chicken broth and the oeuf en cocotte, crème de this and soufflé de that. Her concern was visible, she knew: maddening to him and miraculous simultaneously. He let her order. But he would not let her shave him. ‘I’m not going to be a baby to you,’ he warned, and she said, ‘Fat chance,’ which she knew made him feel safer – but was that part of it? Is wanting him to feel safe anoth
er level of nurseyness and mothering? Early on, she watched him standing shirtless by the china bowl in the barely furnished room, going carefully around his scars, trying to do the folds under his chin where he could not see, nor properly feel. She could see him seeing her in the mirror sitting on her hands on the bed, wanting to help. The only time he let her, despite her tenderness she hurt him, and he flinched, and she could see that he could see that she found it hard not to weep, and he was sorry, and she was sorry, and after that she left the room while he tended himself. He’s a miracle, she thought. So many things he could have died of. Flaps of skin from his scalp down under his chin, his manufactured chin. He’s Frankenstein’s not-monster. Sometimes she found herself shaking at the thought of what he had been through.
He grew brown in the sun. The waxen scalp skin on his jaw took it differently to the rest of his face, but even so he did not want to grow a beard. He paddled the calanque, and day by day she saw his youth and physical strength starting to flood through his body, healing him and fixing him. It transfixed her. She sketched him each day, to map the transformation as it happened, but her sketches were not good enough and she wished she could photograph him. On the third night, she was watching him sleep, wanting to look more closely at him than his manner when awake would allow, to unveil him. Moonlight was falling on his face, on the strangeness of his reconstructed mouth with its slight downward drag at the right-hand corner and the odd lift at the left, a sort of ugly Harlequin half-smile. She wondered if she feared it, if she wanted to look inside, and didn’t dare. She never, ever wanted to offend him or upset him. He stirred and half woke, under the strength of my stare, she thought, and he hoicked himself up and looked at her.
‘My dear,’ he said, and then thought for a while, and said something more – but his mouth was always clumsier after sleep, and also the moonlight was off his face now, and she could not see him to understand him. It had been interesting, academically, to learn that she needed to read his face, but it was not easy, not helpful to the confidences of the pillow and the encouraging sympathies of the dark. She shook her head, and didn’t want to say, ‘I can’t understand you,’ and terribly wanted to kiss him, because that would tell him …
Does it show, that I want to kiss him?
He smiled at her, and for a moment she thought – but then he scruffled her wild hair, and pulled her down to him, in a friendly way, an innocent way, which made it perfectly clear.
She smiled bravely in the dark. Is this it?
The trouble is, the subject only arises – think of the vulgar joke he’d make about that! – in the dark, and in the dark is just where we can’t talk about it. Even if we could. Even if talking about it was what we needed to do. Which …
You must accept it. In sickness and in health. This is what you signed up for.
But we have never had any health, a wailing voice inside cried out, and a clammy feeling settled over her – this is what you signed up for …
But we’re young!
*
Dear God, he’d thought. She doesn’t know what she’s doing. How close that was! Even as he’d tried to stop that gaze, to stop her looking at him like that … wanting her so much, wanting to make clear that she didn’t have to worry about that from him, that he would never …
Oh, fuck.
*
By the second week Riley suggested they hungered for culture. Nadine was quick to agree, and they went back to Paris, where it was she who went to every gallery and every great building, and sought out the collections which had been put away for safety, and found the man who had the key to the closed corridor or the right to let her behind the scaffolding of the restorations. Nadine it was who stared at the light over the Seine for an hour at a time, smiling at the gold and grey.
Riley, meanwhile, read French newspapers, observed French life, watched the French responding to peace, listened to French conversations, and made Nadine talk French to him. Despite the pronunciation problems, he was rather quick to learn. ‘J’aime parler français,’ he said. ‘C’est nouveau pour ma bouche. Les mouvements sont bon – exercise. Comment on le dit? Exercise? Pour le rehabilitation.’ She was proud of him. It was exhausting being with him, watching his determination.
One hot afternoon, they walked together to the elegant little street behind the Place des Vosges where Nadine’s mother’s family had lived. Nadine had been here a year before, in 1918, when she had been mad with grief and exhaustion.
‘I don’t even know where my grandparents are buried,’ she said. ‘Any of these men in hats could be my relatives, and I wouldn’t know! I thought Jewish families were meant to keep close.’ She told him the story Jacqueline had told her, of the Pereire brothers who had built the railways and financed Haussman in building the boulevards, and how one of them had married the other’s daughter. At the age of sixteen Mademoiselle Pereire had become Madame Pereire, her uncle’s wife, and later there was a rose named after her.
They stood outside number seventeen and admired its red bricks and decent windows. They were good houses, prosperous and elegant.
‘I don’t know why it isn’t my mother’s still,’ she said.
‘Will you knock, and ask?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘I’ll ask my mother, when we get home. It’s interesting.’
Interesting! She heard herself say it, and she wanted to scream. Yes, it’s interesting. But. Family history is not a proper occupation on a honeymoon. I am on honeymoon in the city of lovers and I am not an old-fashioned girl. I know what I am missing …
It seemed to her that the balance of blessing and curse on a marriage was a strange and arbitrary thing. Here they were, together, alive, healthy – because damage is not illness. Sane, of good sense and rational optimism. Each in love with the other. And yet.
She knew that Europe – the world – was littered with widows – and widowers too – with shell-shocked husbands and victims of this terrible flu, with the syphilitic and those still croaking for air long after being gassed – and with couples lost to each other, or scared of each other, or who hated each other. She thought of Peter and Julia, of Sybil Ainsworth, widow to Riley’s friend Jack, with her four children up in Wigan, of Rose and the thousands of women who would never now know the joys and perils of matrimony at all – though to be honest, Rose didn’t seem to mind as some women did … oh aren’t Riley and I better off than so many?
Yes, yes of course.
And yet here I am on honeymoon in the city of lovers, where couples kiss on the street, and despite all the blessings of my marriage I cannot be kissed.
*
Riley applied himself most thoroughly. To rowing, to admiring turtles, to improving his shaving technique, to French verbs, to newspapers, to ideas about his future, to planning who he would approach about jobs when they got home, to the names of the stars and of the streets of Paris, and most of all to not looking at Nadine too often or for too long, not catching her eye, not brushing against her.
Is this why men drink? he wondered. Is this what sends them to brothels?
But I don’t want to drink, and I don’t want any other girl …
Chapter Six
Locke Hill, April–May 1919
One night Julia, drunk on desperation, the shiftiness of spring, and the scent of magnolias on the breeze, fuelled by a faith in masculine desire and the disinhibition of her husband’s perpetual inebriation, made a final, very direct attempt at reconciliation. In a way, when she entangled her negligéed body with his semi-comatose drunken one on his study couch, ignoring his whisky breath, rubbing her breasts on his stubbly face, unlatching the trousers he hadn’t changed for days, murmuring, still, of love, she succeeded. Sex, of an instinctive, semi-conscious kind, was achieved, and affection was there, a sort of bewildered, ancient warmth. At the end she gazed hopefully. She was embarrassed by how inappropriate her radiance might be. And yet again, despite the fact that he was incapable of any such thing, physically, mentally, or emotionally, sh
e allotted to him the stroke of authority and the right to decide about their marriage, their future and their love.
He did weep, which was promising. She wept too. But he had no answer for her increasingly desperate pleas for reassurance, or a declaration about the future, or something.
‘I don’t know,’ he said, over and over. And finally: ‘Stop asking me.’
She went back up to her bed. It was not mentioned afterwards, and their eyes did not meet.
*
Soon after, early one morning, Peter left. He didn’t tell his wife he was going, and Rose only found out because Mrs Joyce heard Max barking at the station taxi as it went down the drive.
‘But where’s he gone?’ asked Rose, who was about to leave for the hospital.
‘I don’t know,’ said Mrs Joyce, bewildered. ‘Millie was about to bring him his breakfast.’
They just stood by the front door, honeysuckle dangling about them from the porch, the sky clear and blue and beautiful above them.
Upstairs, a window was thrown up.
‘What’s going on?’ cried Julia, her voice carrying down.
Rose and Mrs Joyce glanced at each other. ‘I’ll go up,’ Rose said.
‘What on earth is going on?’ Julia called again, and somewhere inside the house Tom’s young voice called out, ‘What on earth is going on?’ (At this Rose felt her heart slip down sideways, and thought: I should have made him go to Switzerland, I should have made Dr Tayle send her on a rest cure. Mrs Joyce and I are the only sane people here. I should have sent them off, anywhere with blankets over their laps, on deckchairs. Beef tea. Chicken broth.)
Upstairs, Julia felt strange to be standing up.
‘Has he gone?’ she said. ‘Has he left?’
‘Well, he’s gone somewhere,’ Rose replied. ‘I—’
‘Good,’ said Julia.
‘Oh Julia—’ Rose blurted, and Julia said, quite politely, ‘Don’t you hate it Rose, when someone says, “You don’t mean that,” as if they knew better than you what you mean?’
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