by Louisa Young
Dear Masino,
I haven’t heard from you for so long. Have you given up on me? I wouldn’t blame you. But as things just get worse and worse I have to ask you again: please help us. Tomaso, I don’t know how to write this. These words. Vittorio is in internal exile. In other words, in prison. It is an island. He was
Here Tom broke off, and scanned the next few sentences. He paused a moment and blinked before taking up again:
I have no words – none beyond these, not good enough. Mama hit Papà. War is inside and out. She has gone to Termoli, the nearest she can get to San Domino, where Vittorio is. I don’t know what she thinks she can do there. Stefano says nothing – nothing. He wants to join the army but even if they want fifteen-years-olds (I don’t think they do) they do not want Jews. You may wonder about Papà. He is losing his mind. He looks at maps and plans all day, and he smiles at everything, and at the same time he cries. There is no Jewish doctor to look at him. Anyway the Jews are not talking to us. So I am cooking and holding the house together, a bit.
Did you get the photographs? They weren’t very good. I went to the Embassy: I spoke of Carmichael and the man said he knew him and gave me 50 lire, so if he asks for it back from Carmichael or you then you will know that I need your help. But when I went back he was no longer there.
I know you had ideas; I don’t know what has happened about them. But things are not going to get better. Soon we will lose on both sides: Italians, enemies of England; Jews, enemies of the Nazis. So then what, for us? I cannot imagine. I can only hope that the war will keep them so busy they will have no time for tormenting us. Again I ask the ridiculous question – are my letters not reaching you? I don’t understand why I do not hear from you. Please. I am sorry for all the times I didn’t listen to you. Is it that?
Please help us now.
Nenna
‘Is it too late?’ Riley said.
‘It was always too late,’ Carmichael said. ‘Sorry, Tom. For Fiore, certainly. We can have a go for the children. Do they have passports?’
‘She does. I don’t think Marinella and Stefano do.’
‘Their father would have to apply for them.’
‘Oh Christ!’ Tom burst out, and turned away.
*
Nenna, Nenna, Nenna. Tom’s legs felt a little lame. He’d been trying to put through a call to Rome: no luck. Just long empty noises hanging in space and distance. It didn’t sound as if the phone was even ringing. He pictured it, black and squat on the credenza in the hall. Aldo might answer, or Stefano. She is in such pain and trouble—
Tomorrow morning he would telephone to the Embassy in Rome; he would go back to London – he’d take Carmichael – and they could draw up an actual plan. Now she was willing – at last, thank GOD, she was willing – now they could get papers and money to her.
*
They were all waiting for lunch in the hotel restaurant, around a table with a slightly grubby cloth on it. It was a nervy group: Tom had been on the phone again all morning sending telegrams, and was jumping with frustration, about to head back to town; Nadine had insisted that he eat before he set off, which he didn’t want to do, and Kitty was trying to hide her disappointment that Carmichael was going with him. Lunch was to be chicken with white sauce, and treacle tart; Riley was thinking that he could probably manage the chicken when the manager came in, coughed importantly, and made an announcement.
‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ he said. ‘Excuse us for the interruption but we thought you would like to be informed that we have just heard on the wireless that Herr Hitler has invaded Poland.’
Riley’s heart seemed to lie down within him, to spread and melt, to disappear almost.
Breaths were taken. Silences and murmurings ebbed and flooded around the room. ‘What?’ said someone, fractiously. ‘What?’
‘Is that it, then?’ asked Nadine.
Tom unfolded himself, raising his long pale self like some kind of wraith.
‘Tom,’ said Riley, and paused. Nadine put her hand out.
Tom touched it, gently, as he walked past on his way to the telephone cubicle. Carmichael rose and went with him. There was a glow in Tom’s eye. ‘Fighter or bomber?’ he said to Kitty, as he passed.
‘Fighter,’ said Kitty. ‘Knowing you.’
‘I’m not so sure,’ said Tom. ‘Could go either way.’
‘And me?’ Carmichael said.
‘Intelligence, of course.’
Kitty was as white and as bold as her brother. Paper children, Riley thought, and mine, though I never deserved them. And now I shall lose them. He watched Tom go. They don’t know. How could they know? And everybody who used to know has forgotten. Everyone has forgotten.
Nadine stood up. For a moment she stared in the direction Tom had gone; she looked to Riley. It was a desperate gaze she gave him, her mouth hanging a little open, her eyes imploring but at the same time knowing that they must not implore. She was shaking her head.
‘It might not be,’ she said. ‘They might—’
‘But all this has been going on for so long now,’ Riley said.
‘Like in America,’ she said. ‘Where people dance day and night for weeks, hoping to win ten dollars, and falling over from exhaustion …’
‘Nadine,’ said Riley, helplessly. ‘Not much we can do about it.’
‘Are we just back to where we were?’ she said. ‘Is that it? We’re back there again?’
‘The Prime Minister will have something to say,’ Riley said. ‘This isn’t necessarily it.’ He didn’t believe himself.
Tom came back half an hour later. ‘Twenty minutes queueing and then I can’t even get a bloody operator,’ he said. ‘It’s no way to run a war. I should probably sign up as a telephone engineer – that’s what they need. What are you going to do, Kitty?’
‘I am in the Foreign Office, Tom,’ said Kitty. ‘I’ll see what they’ve got for me. What did girls do in your war, Riley? Nurses and typing I suppose. Perhaps they’ll let us drive and ride motorbikes this time round.’
This time round.
‘Oh, girls rode motorbikes,’ Nadine said.
Of course, Riley thought, of course Kitty will be brave and fine because Nadine, not her own poor mother, has been her model. And Tom will be brave and fine because the example of Peter’s turnaround is stronger than his weakness. They will volunteer, and go, wherever they have to go this time, and do their bit, whatever their bit turns out to be, and they will try to be as good as us, and maybe get their face or their mind blown apart too, and spend their lives trying to be as good as we have been at living with that. Better than us.
Children, he thought. Children. They know nothing. They’ve been nowhere. Oh God.
‘Might join the army myself,’ Kitty was saying now, grinning boldly; more boldly than she could possibly feel. Surely. Surely they understand? ‘If I could have a motorbike. Do the right thing!’
But girls were killed too, motorbike or no motorbike. Slit trenches full of nurses, Gothas raining down on them; Spanish flu, infections and syphilis and the sinking of the Marquette …
Riley looked up and saw Nadine, watching them across the room. How do they look to her, these children? Like her life’s work, about to be smashed to pieces? Are we really so stupid? Are we?
Riley dredged around inside himself for the courage he used to have. It must be there somewhere. Where is it? Has it melted away, because it’s not needed for me now, but for them? His heart beat fast and light: pitter pat, pitter pat.
Tom and Kitty remained, alert, strong, on the nice little armchairs around the low table. Not our war. Your war, Riley thought. Look at you, so beautiful. Your war, that we couldn’t prevent. Babies …
Kitty said: ‘And what are we going to do about Nenna?’
‘Everything we can,’ Tom said, pushing himself up again from the chair, and it was as much as Riley could do not to weep.
*
The day turned into a tangle of frustrations and indecisio
n. Johnny’s car wouldn’t start, the phone lines were overloaded, Tom trying to telephone, Kitty deciding she wanted to get back to, there were no cabs to get to Norwich for the train, everyone wanting and failing to go here or there, and changing their minds, until in the afternoon Nadine made them all sit down and have tea, and said: ‘Enough. No point everyone running around now. Tom, you can get hold of them tomorrow. It still might not be … Go and get some fresh air,’ she said, as if he were twelve. ‘Go and stride about. I might come out. Kitty? Riley?’
‘Are we allowed?’ Kitty asked.
‘We’re not at war yet,’ Tom said. ‘And they won’t invade here. They have to invade at Thanet, or somewhere.’
‘Well someone thinks they might,’ said Kitty. ‘There’s rolls of barbed wire already out there on the beach.’
‘I rather think that’s for fencing, sweetheart,’ Nadine said.
‘They’ll come by air,’ said Tom. ‘Thousands of paratroopers.’ At which Riley got to his feet, feeling the weight of tiredness, anger, and sadness on him as he went towards the stairs. He trailed his hand along Nadine’s shoulder as he left, as if saying, ‘I don’t need you to follow me.’
The others stared east, as if the Nazi planes and troop carriers might already be massing just beyond the horizon.
*
In the end, Tom and Riley went out. By the time they got on to the marshes it was a beautiful evening: the sky so very high and deepening blue, the sun behind them in the west gleaming low and gold on the samphire-studded mudflats; the gilded pools rippling silently as the tide slipped in to fill them. There was the odd bird.
Tom was a little ahead of Riley, towards the base of the last bank of dunes before the open sea, and Riley could see his bare shining head, not in any damn uniform, with any damn hat, thank Christ, his boots clagging with wet sand as he trudged on. Somewhere over to the left – not far – shots were being fired – a poacher? A harrier suddenly rose, clacking its alarm, and along the beach in the distance someone whistled for their dog. Riley heard the dog barking just as the low, loud tide siren started to moan, and drown it out.
It all became terribly clear to him as the siren started, and the dark figure on the slope before him went to scramble up. Fillets of sand were crumbling beneath his feet, and a smell of cordite drifted on the air. Tom climbed on up, long legs, arms reaching, not even a tin hat on, and Riley saw, suddenly and as live as day, this son crucified on the parapet, in No Man’s Land, and all the other dear boys running towards him; he saw barbed wire and limbs, and the rain of bullets beyond, and he saw the sky falling in, again.
Riley thought, I could shoot him now. It would save so much time and trouble.
He shook his head clear. None of that. He gave it a minute.
A poacher’s gun. A tide siren.
He almost laughed. Leadswinging by proxy, now, is it?
That is the past. That is the past. What’s coming now is—
*
On the way back they stopped in at the pub; and it was such a silly thing that set it off. Such a silly thing. A man in an unfortunate jacket, standing at the bar with some other men, red-faced, been there since opening time by the look of them, excited about the news about the imminence of war, war war war, everyone was saying, eyebrows up and under-informed bravado at the ready, a kind of premature ejaculation, Riley thought – well, this one said, ‘But we should be with Herr Hitler. He can’t keep his flies buttoned when it comes to someone else’s country, but he’s some good ideas. He’s right about the Jews!’
So Riley turned to him, mildly, and said, quite clearly and identifiably sadly, ‘My wife is Jewish.’
The man looked at him, with a sort of sneer, which swiftly curdled up with the bewilderment of the ‘What’s wrong with your face?’ look, and so then he gave a sort of snort and, in a gesture of default self-defence, he waved his hand by his temple in the ‘he’s-bonkers’ twirl. So one of his mates said, ‘Steady, George,’ but Tom was on his feet towards him, and George, twitching, burly, old enough to know better even in a public bar, said, ‘Oh I stand by that, I do!’ and then, seeing the height, youth and expression of Tom, lashed out, flailing and useless, but he managed to catch Riley a wild hard crack on the right of his jaw.
The crack of bone, the thud of flesh, the cry of pain. Blood and teeth. And the splint, askew, falling weird and alien and semi-attached out of Riley’s poor mouth. He felt it. Mashed up.
‘What the fock’s that,’ the man said.
Riley had bitten his tongue. Oh, that taste of his own blood in his mouth!
A couple of blokes were holding Tom away. He dropped his head and came up calm. He turned to the men around him and said, with a nod to George, ‘Well, you’ll remember whose side he’s on. Attacking a decorated veteran of Ypres and Passchendaele, for having a Jewish wife.’
Riley tried to speak, tried to smile at his own attempt to speak, swallowed some blood and thought briefly about the curious effect your own blood has on your faeces when you swallow enough of it. He thought, I really wasn’t asking for it. Nadine can’t be angry with me, it’s not like in Wigan, and then he had to think about Ainsworth, and then he sighed, the vastest sigh.
Actually it hurt a lot.
*
Tom walked Riley back, holding him steady with a clean pub dishcloth against his face. The landlady had wanted to call the doctor, but Tom said no, his mother was a nurse, they’d go back to the hotel. Of course Riley remembered his long walk outside Zonnebeck.
Kitty ran to embrace Riley, and reeled back. He stood there, confused. He had reverted: wounded Riley, who does nothing. Someone else take charge. His grey eyes were emptying with the pain. He did not say anything, or give the small sideways smile.
*
Nadine’s head swam slightly at the sight of him, the napkins under his jaw, the look on his face. But her thought was, Thank God. Thank God we are in a peaceful place, we have a car, there is petrol, we are not so far from London, we are twenty years on, there are not thousands of him, we have Mr Gillies in his clean and tidy office, there is none of the crisis, none of the filth, none of the … She did not care to remember the things there were none of. She sent Kitty for the hotel first-aid kit; allowed a doctor to be called solely to provide some morphine, and carefully cleaned Riley up. He seemed to want to unscrew the splint on the other side, but she couldn’t hold the damaged side up in the right way for long enough, and even putting his finger in his mouth made him gasp and catch. She couldn’t really see what was happening in there. She thought the bones might be shattered on both sides. The blow had come from the left, Tom said; the splint could have jarred the bone on the right as well and … well. There was a fair amount of blood.
*
Tom telephoned everyone he could think of, to get Gillies’ home number. The lines were still impossible, and for a moment he had the illogical thought that he should be able to get a line, because the imminence of war should only be affecting telephone calls connected with imminent war. In the end they just drove off into the dark, Tom at the wheel, Kitty map-reading with a torch, Nadine holding Riley upright in the back. They got home after midnight and Tom half-carried Riley inside.
*
‘There was some kind of bust up,’ Nadine said. ‘I wasn’t there.’ She had never been to see Gillies with Riley before. It was early, before his clinic was meant to open. She hadn’t slept.
Riley pulled his bandage aside, and spat blood into an enamel kidney basin. He gestured for a pen and paper, and Gillies handed it to him, observing both of them.
Mortified. My fault entirely. Took exception to an anti-Semite.
Nadine slipped forward and took the paper from him with a gentle touch, and handed it to Gillies, who read it.
Riley leaned back, suddenly, and looked from one to the other. His face was white as bone.
‘Let’s take a look,’ said Gillies, and Nadine again stood away, and let them do what they had to do. Riley’s head fell back. Gillies
washed his hands, unwrapped him, peered, dilated, murmured.
‘The splint is a goner,’ he said. ‘Which is good. I’ve been trying to get him to get rid of it for years.’
‘What do you mean?’ Nadine said.
‘So I can give him a graft,’ Gillies said. ‘Bit of rib, or tibia. Much stronger, more longlasting. This jaw is like the Treaty of Versailles – it was never going to hold, and it’s a miracle it’s lasted as long as it did.’
She didn’t understand.
‘We can finish his treatment,’ Gillies explained. ‘Do what we should have done in 1919.’
‘What?’ she said.
‘He wouldn’t let me,’ Gillies said, and her face told him, and he said, ‘I’m sorry. You didn’t know.’
‘I didn’t,’ she said. ‘I thought that was it.’ She glanced at Riley. She hoped her face didn’t look accusing, but she feared it probably did. He looked so helpless there, in the chair, throat naked, mouth adrift. I know he’s in the best of hands. ‘The best of surgeons and sisters’ – the phrase came to her, where was it from – ah – the field postcard. ‘I was admitted with a slight/severe wound in my … fill in as appropriate … I am now comfortable with the best of surgeons and sisters to do all that is necessary for me.’
She thought, looking at him, I will protect you and love you in every way it takes. Now, then, always, forever.
‘Well,’ Gillies said. ‘We’ll admit you now, Riley, and I’ll try to fit you in tomorrow. It doesn’t look too complex. Don’t worry!’ he said, and his smile was a bright flag of confidence. ‘We’re much better at it than we used to be.’
Riley made a noise Nadine hadn’t heard for years: the noise of bitter laughter through a wound.
*
The Prime Minister spoke on the radio. He told the country that the British Ambassador in Berlin had handed the German government a final note stating that, unless he heard from them by eleven o’clock that they were prepared at once to withdraw their troops from Poland, a state of war would exist between them. The Prime Minister said he had to tell them now that no such undertaking had been received, and that consequently this country is at war with Germany. He said it was a bitter blow. He said, Up to the very last it would have been quite possible to have arranged a peaceful and honourable settlement between Germany and Poland, but Hitler would not have it. He said, His action shows convincingly that there is no chance of expecting that this man will ever give up his practice of using force to gain his will. He can only be stopped by force. He said, The situation in which no word given by Germany’s ruler could be trusted, and no people or country could feel itself safe, has become intolerable. He said he was resolved to finish it. He said, Play your part. He said, Calmness, and courage. He said, May God bless you all and I am certain that right will prevail.
