Heroes' Welcome

by Young, Louisa

  ‘Yes, I do,’ said Rose, honestly.

  Silence.

  ‘But Julia, why …?’ Rose blurted, and Julia snapped: ‘I have no idea, Rose. Who ever has any idea why Peter does or doesn’t do anything? He doesn’t know himself. And even if he did, I’d be the last person he’d tell.’ They stared at each other for a moment and then Julia said ‘Sorry,’ rather abruptly. She stood on the landing, like a lost lighthouse, her silky dressing gown pooling round her feet. ‘I’m trying to hate him,’ she said. ‘Obviously it’s difficult, but loving him has done us no good at all and I can’t think of anything else.’ She stared around her. ‘And of course it’s rather undignified, you know, when one has made promises and – one’s married – and so forth. It seems I’m letting the side down again after all.’

  Rose’s eyes were full of understanding – of how Julia was by nature loving, and her love had at some stage been true and natural; of how she had loved Peter so very conciously, so much and in the face of so much provocation, during the war, that stopping now must involve a considerable wound to her dignity and the investment she had made. Her expression filled Julia with fury.

  ‘Don’t gaze at me,’ she snapped. ‘You look like some kind of large mammal.’

  Rose blinked.

  *

  Tom was squatting quietly behind the drawing-room door.

  *

  The next day Julia was sitting on the white iron chair on the lawn, not saying anything to Tom, who was throwing stones at the walls, the cows across the ha-ha, and finally at his mother’s feet.

  Rose came across, looking important. Julia glanced up. ‘Gosh,’ she said. ‘You’ve something to say, haven’t you? Tommy, stop that. Is it news from my errant husband?’

  ‘In a way,’ said Rose. ‘Blakeman rang up.’ Blakeman was Peter’s mother’s butler, currently in situ at Chester Square.

  ‘Blakeman! We’re honoured. No word from Peter himself, then?’

  Tom wandered over and stood by them, dropping stones one by one on to his own feet.

  ‘He’s staying at Chester Square,’ Rose said.

  ‘And is he all right?’

  ‘Apparently.’

  Relief and disappointment curdled in Julia’s breast. Relief that he was all right, disappointment that he had no good reason for his neglect. If he’d been murdered, he’d have an excuse.

  ‘No message from him?’ she asked.

  ‘Apparently not,’ said Rose.

  Tom was picking up the pebbles again, and suddenly threw them up into the air, like a cloud of midges, and ran into the middle of them.

  ‘Stop that!’ Julia shouted, and Tom ran away across the lawn, not even turning to look at her. The last stones fell behind him. Julia made a face, and turned back to Rose.

  ‘No … news of his plans?’ she said.

  ‘No,’ said Rose.

  Relief and disappointment retreated; fury and pity battled for a moment. Fury won.

  ‘How charming of him,’ Julia said. ‘Ask Millie to come and help me pack, would you?’

  ‘Where are you going?’ Rose said, alarmed.

  ‘Elsewhere,’ Julia said. ‘Else. Where.’ She flashed her eyes at Rose, and stood up.

  ‘Oh,’ said Rose. ‘What about Tom?’

  ‘Tom doesn’t like me,’ Julia said, heading for the house. ‘You know that. He doesn’t need me. He can go to school.’ She was almost marching now – through the hall, up the stairs. ‘Honestly, Rose – really,’ – calling back over her shoulder – ‘do you think either of his parents is the slightest good to him?’

  ‘Julia—’

  ‘Now …’ she said.

  ‘Julia—’

  ‘… come upstairs. Never mind Millie. You can help me pack.’

  ‘Julia—’

  ‘Pass me my jewellery box, would you, darling …’

  ‘Julia! Where are you going?’

  ‘Timbuctoo,’ she said. ‘The passport office. The bank. My lawyer.’

  ‘You don’t have a lawyer—’

  ‘Istanbul,’ said Julia, throwing a pile of clothes on the bed. ‘Peru.’

  ‘Julia—’

  And Julia turned and fixed her with a look. ‘Rose. I am not living and dying like this. In this – here …’ She stared around. ‘With the herbaceous borders and the damn cushions. And the damn decanters. It’s a – it’s a cesspit, Rose. You know it. You should leave too. Don’t stay here. Though,’ – and she gave a little laugh – ‘once we’re gone, it’ll probably be rather nice. Do send Millie up. I want to catch the one-twenty.’

  *

  So Rose called Millie and, coming back up the stairs, she felt rising within her the combination of irritation and yearning so often felt by sensible people who long to be capable of folly. Here I am again, she thought. About to clear up after them. She made herself squash it. Still, she thought. At least Julia seems to have cast off her delusions about Peter’s ability to attend to her.

  ‘Poor Julia,’ Rose murmured, hardly realising she had spoken out loud, and received a quick little whiplash for it from Julia on the landing above her.

  ‘Are you pitying me, Rose? I do wonder what you’ll find to occupy your time, when we’re both gone, and you have nobody to feel superior to.’ Julia’s eyes were bright. She was not sorry. She’d spent her whole life trying to be nice and having to be grateful.

  Rose thought: She does look beautiful, in a rather terrible way.

  ‘But no matter – he’ll probably divorce me and then you can marry him. You’d like that. Wouldn’t you?’

  Good Lord, thought Rose. I’d be the last to imagine I knew anything at all about love, but I’m fairly certain that what Julia’s doing now is not it.

  But actually Rose did not care what Julia said, because Rose had an interview to go to.

  *

  Rose had of course been to Devonshire House before. Its heavy rising walls held no terrors for her. She had had her initial interviews here; she had picked up items of uniform once, and her stripes: white for service, red for efficiency in a military hospital, and blue for passing the exams. She had, on occasion, made use of the little club with its library and writing room, and had liked having a place in town where there was always someone to have a chat with. Early for her interview, she was waiting there now, looking at her newspaper, checking her shoes, feeling a complete fool.

  A girl called Eileen turned up, a bumptious and unstoppable girl whose path had crossed Rose’s over the years, and they took each other’s minds off their nervousness. Eileen had contracted pneumonia and empyema while serving in Salonika, and had been cared for at the VAD Nursing Home in Nottingham Place.

  ‘But your singing!’ cried Rose. Eileen had been a professional before the war. She had sung around the wards and made a number of young men very happy, and then very sad.

  ‘That’s why I’m here,’ she said. ‘I applied for a scholarship for training to regain my voice. Why not? I lost it to the war, in service. It’s only fair. And they can say no if they want. I know it’s hardly a health service, but it was my employment … and it is training. I have just the course in mind. With a marvellous Hungarian …’ She had been recommended to the Finance Committee for special consideration.

  ‘Are you here to be interviewed?’ Eileen said.

  Rose nodded, suddenly dumb.

  ‘What for?’

  ‘Medicine,’ Rose blurted, and whatever Matron and Major Gillies had said, she felt a fraud and a fool and an idiot, saying it out loud here to Eileen, in this place.

  Eileen was gazing at her fondly. ‘Oh, you’ll be a lovely doctor,’ she said. ‘All kind and bossy. You’ll be grand. And if they’ll pay for me to sing again, they’ll surely pay for you to put all those men in their place.’

  The tiny things that help you, Rose thought as she walked in.

  *

  The Committee was Dr Janet Campbell from the Ministry of Health, Dr Janet Lane-Claypon from the Board of Education, Lady Oliver, Lady Ampthill
herself, and Miss Cochrane, secretary. Lady Ampthill was in uniform. Dr Lane-Claypon was what Gillies called a doctor-doctor – she had a PhD as well as a medical degree. She had published such interesting work on breast-feeding, before the war. Five women. Powerful intelligent educated women in charge, and not a man among them. Rose found she was smiling, though they did not smile at her.

  ‘You seem happy, Miss Locke,’ said Lady Ampthill.

  ‘I am, madam,’ said Rose. She actually felt rather mad. She was so excited!

  ‘May we ask why?’

  ‘To see a committee made up entirely of women,’ she said honestly.

  ‘Are you against men?’ asked Lady Oliver.

  ‘Not in the least,’ said Rose. ‘I have worked under them and alongside them, caring for them, for some years now. I’d just rather treat them and cure them than marry one.’

  Eyebrows went up.

  ‘I am glad to be judged by women,’ she said. ‘And to see women in a position to judge me.’

  They asked some fairly tough questions, and some very personal ones. They looked sternly over their glasses. They shuffled papers. They conferred quietly. They did everything a committee of interviewers should do, and Rose sat.

  No, certainly, she had no plans to marry.

  No, she had no money of her own.

  No, she had no dependants.

  Yes, she loved her work.

  Well, that was very kind of Matron to say so. And, gosh, that was very kind of Major Gillies. (She feared she was blushing. He hadn’t had to say anything at all!)

  General practice, she felt. If she were so fortunate as to be given the opportunity. Though fascinated by surgery, she did not feel she had the steadiness of hand. Though in the course of training another specialism might emerge and she would, she hoped, if she had the opportunity, be open to any such possibility. If she had the opportunity. She was also very interested, she found herself saying, in the long-term effects of war damage on the minds of the men. Neurasthenia, shell shock and so on. What the connections are, if any, between the physical injuries and the mental disorders, and the change in character that some families were observing in returning soldiers. ‘A patient at the Queen’s once told me,’ she said, ‘a very fearful, confused young man with a facial injury and a degree of shell shock, that he felt that the strings which held him together had been cut. That seems to me a very interesting way of putting it.’

  ‘You’re not saying you believe the human body to be held together with strings, Miss Locke?’ said Dr Lane-Claypon.

  Rose had to look at her to see if she was joking.

  ‘My anatomical reference was metaphorical,’ she said. ‘But I am certain that a chap’s frame of mind affects his physical wellbeing. And that emotions such as fear are felt in the body. Yes.’

  ‘Lots of possibilities then, Miss Locke,’ said Lady Ampthill. The ladies seemed to be satisfied.

  Rose came out with a tiny curl of hope inside her, feeling, not impossible. Not impossible.

  Chapter Seven

  London, May–June 1919

  Peter had stopped going, even occasionally, to the office. He no longer needed to display his resentment to Uncle Eric. He had been favoured by the fortune of his birth – how many men had a job to come back to? How many would have given their eye teeth in gratitude? – and he had blown the opportunity. So be it. He hadn’t felt right there, anyway. Hadn’t felt safe from his own inclination to smash up the office, set fire to the files and slap some kind of understanding into his uncle.

  The pre-war archives in Birmingham! Is that what the past four years qualifies me for? Back in time and miles away?

  The main thing now was to be undisturbed. If he put himself in the right place, in the right position, nobody would notice him, and nothing would come to trouble him. The thing was, to find that place, and that position, and to stay very still: a camouflage, a bird, a lookout, a communications mast disguised as a tree. Any motionless thing.

  Last year, he had sought the stillness at the heart of the storm: the carousing and the dancing and the mad gay whirl, that tempest of jazz and idiocy with which so many held off the night and the fear and the grief. Over and over, then, he had found himself blind with tears, staring into the dark. Cheero! That was Sassoon – what was the poem? ‘To Any Dead Officer’? Something like that. You can’t stare at other people’s sufferings without going blind. You can’t go on running around every night until you collapse in tears …

  Then, for a while, he had found that stillness – an exquisite stillness – courtesy of Mr Brilliant Chang, or Mrs Ada Song Ping Yoo at 16 Dover Street, or on a couple of particularly squalid occasions in Limehouse. A girl he used to see at the Forty-Four, a sweet girl, Billie, had taken him to Dover Street and there had been a kind of security there in the company of the comatose. She called it Chinese Courage, though it gave him no courage at all, just the sweet dreamless sleep. But sleep’s no good. You wake up, and you remember. And it seemed wrong to him. Morphine was medicinal; it was for the wounded men, for the dying and the deserving. He did not deserve it. The proper drug of the miserable was booze. And then Billie had died too, in her flat, and it had been in the press. She was some kind of actress. He hadn’t known. Her brother had been killed.

  There was still a special section in The Times death announcements headed ‘Died of Wounds’. I would say that Billie died of wounds, but she won’t be included. Nor will any of the men with syphilis who would have been at home with their wives, nor any of their syphilitic babies, nor anyone who dies of this flu, which the returning soldiers are delivering around the world so efficiently …

  Oh, be quiet, mind.

  Cheero!

  The club, membership of which had come to Peter in his father’s will, was no good. Too many acquaintances, men already memorialising their wars into anecdote, repeating their stories in a way which made Peter freeze into nausea. Restaurants could be all right, but they tended to close in the afternoons. Chester Square would have been absolutely fine, though apparently his mother had put it up for sale, but for Blakeman, who for some reason was still in London, despite her being in Scotland and servants being impossible to find – anyway, there was Blakeman, cleaning everything and having opinions, which made the house impossible except for sleeping in. And Blakeman’s opinions, though mostly concerned with the desirability of the imminent appearance of Mrs Locke and Master Tom, included some on how much, when and where Peter slept.

  For a few days, the Chester Arms answered his needs. There was a corner seat with a low table and a sheltering panel, not too far from the fire, where a man might read the paper in detail, or the Iliad at length, and have his whisky brought neat, with soda separate. It was close enough that returning home for a nap during afternoon closing was not too demanding. But Blakeman – apparently through some connection with the landlord – located him, and took to popping in and thinking that he should be somewhere else. So Peter moved on, across Belgravia and down towards Chelsea: the Anglesea on Onslow Gardens, the Builders’ on Britten Street, the Chelsea Potter on King’s Road, the little hovel off Old Church Street. He was far from the only man moving very slowly from pub to pub, and sitting alone and silent. But wherever he went he was followed, sooner or later, if not by Blakeman then by the consciousness of duty, by fears and shames, by the memory of the expectations of others, and the ghosts of failures past, and, on occasion, the ghosts of Burdock, Knightley, Atkins, Jones, Bloom, Bruce, Lovall, Hall, Green, Wester, Johnson, Taylor, Moles, Twyford and Merritt. Patroclus. God knows, I was no Achilles, but I was betrayed … and I betrayed …

  The King’s Head & Eight Bells, quiet, and scruffy, down by the river on Cheyne Walk, became his favourite. The staff – such as they were – didn’t bother him. It amused him that it used to be two pubs – it helped him to feel that he wasn’t really anywhere. He liked how ancient it was, and to think of Tudor youths stepping on and off boats in their hose, going about their drunken Tudor business, down to Gree
nwich, up to Hampton Court, all of them dead now, and forgotten. This helped him to feel out of time and beyond its expectations. He could walk up to the Chelsea Physic Garden, and lie under a tree, and see if silence would come to him, and occasionally it did. Sweet dark whisky and the cold dark river matched for him: the grey muddy chill of the river, its dank wild smell, the ancient brick walls and greasy mud and the green slime clinging to its mooring posts, its inevitability; the warm honey glow of the whisky, the stone-cut flavour at its heart and the cool peaty smell, the creeping tendrils of its effect, its inevitability … the hidden depths of each; the capacity of each, if he just leaned forward, to rise up, and overtake him. Which to drown in?

  Whisky, he felt, was Scylla – the six-headed monster guarding – or welcoming you to? – the gateway to Charybdis, the whirlpool that no one can escape. Which is death. Or, perhaps, memory – the vortex of shame and horror which drags you back, over and over – or of sweet memories – of before – of what is lost …

  Or am I just lotos-eating? Taking off another few years on the journey home? Or turning into a pig …

  He was leaning over Bazalgette’s fine stone embankment wall, smoking, a month or so after leaving Locke Hill. His leg ached. It usually did, but he didn’t think about it: background pain seemed right to him, a fair price to pay for the fact that he had been carried back when so many others stayed out there on the wire, in the sinkholes. A sort of tax. Nobody knew it hurt, and to mention it would be to ask for sympathy: verboten. Anyway, booze was a marvellous painkiller.

  Normally in this position he would be glancing over at the Albert Bridge on the left and Battersea Bridge on the right, and musing in general terms about which would be the better to jump off so he could just be with them in the halls of death, instead of having them visit every night, but now he was distracted. Out on the river a cormorant was struggling epically with an eel, chucking it and catching it, frisking over the surface of the water, trying to get the slithery length of the creature vertical enough for long enough to swallow it down his oily black gullet – a sword swallower of a bird – astonishing patience …