by John Masters
She said: ‘You tried to get him to sleep with you, Peggy. And you succeeded.’ Peggy’s face was changing colour, a red coming into it, and the wine bottle was empty; she, Emily, had not finished her first glass. She went on: ‘You are a bitch, Peggy. A rather stupid bitch now. Did you hope I’d go running round London, trying to find out about Peter, slowly learning that what you said was the truth? Did you want to see me making plans to get to America and then gradually realizing that I couldn’t leave Peter? You are a fool, as well as a bitch and a whore. You know I will go to him, and you know why. Because I love him. Because he’s my husband, Peggy. Husband. It’s no pain, no dreadful thing that I’m going to face when I see him, only my husband, and my marriage.’
Peggy was sitting back, her face dull red and her lips white- clenched between her teeth and the napkin crushed between her fingers. Emily pushed back her chair with such force that it teetered a moment and then crashed to the floor.
‘You hate me, don’t you?’ she said.
‘Yes. Yes,’ Peggy said suddenly. ‘I hate you.’
‘Because Peter married me instead of you?’
‘Because you made love to him to get him. Oh, don’t think it wasn’t obvious in your eyes when you got down the Matterhorn that day--a cheap, dirty skivvy’s trick, and you pretending to be so virginal, and my best friend. How often did you sleep with Gerry, too, in the old days, in Zermatt, in London?’
Emily said: ‘I was your best friend, and I tried to be for years after--till you showed that all you could find to remember, out of everything we’d been to each other, was hate. Well, go on. You were saying that you’d persuaded my husband to take you out two or three times, and that you then seduced him because he’s got shell shock. What did you expect to come of that? That Peter would run away from me, because he felt guilty, when I tried to find him? So that you would be able to hug yourself for ever while Peter and I spent our lives in fear and loathing of each other?’
‘You haven’t answered about Gerry,’ Peggy said breathlessly. ‘Who killed Gerry? Why did you get yourself a baby from him? Of course it’s Gerry’s. Why else did you run away? But why did you make him have you? I never understood. Just to make sure of his death, by suicide if not by Peter’s bullet in the back?’
‘No,’ Emily said. ‘No, Peter didn’t!’
‘Didn’t he? You are the fool, to believe that. And you’re wrong about another thing, too.’ Peggy regained some part of her old manner and spoke with an attempt at nonchalance, though her heavy breathing raised her breasts in a slow, irregular rhythm. ‘I did not seduce Peter. I tried, though. I thought I’d learn what were the secrets of your success. For the first time in my life I went out to get a man. I thought I’d find out how skivvies act and feel, skivvies in rich clothes lying on the grass with their skirts up, with their best friend’s man. I even thought I might get a baby, too. Harry doesn’t seem to be able to give me one. But nothing happened, my dear. I tried every way. So did Peter. I’m afraid that, in that way, the same as in every other way, Peter is impotent.’
Inconsequent thoughts flowed through Emily’s mind. She’d had trousers on that day, her skirt being under the bed in the Schonbühl hut. It must have made it more difficult, but she couldn’t remember any mechanical details of love-making at all, only love. Tears were beginning to flow down her cheeks because the triumph in Peggy’s face was unbearable. To realize that Peggy thought this was the ultimate blow, the last torturing wound--that Peggy believed their sexual union had been the only cause of their marriage, the only bond between them! And in a moment Peggy would learn that this whole journey of hate had been destined, even before she set out on it, only to breed more love in Emily for her husband.
‘Peggy,’ she said at last, drying her eyes, ‘you’d better go to your room. Alice will give you breakfast, and I’ll order the trap from the village in the morning, so that you can catch the first train. Thank you for coming down to tell me.’
The triumph dimmed and went out. Peggy’s face set to stone, and without a word she turned on her heel and ran out of the room. Her running feet echoed in the empty passage and died.
Emily sat down in front of the dying fire. It was a shame that Peter should have this misfortune too, because in the physical acts of love she could have told him of love and trust in ways that no words can encompass. There, too, was an arena in which a man, shattered in everything else, could yet build a sort of confidence. Well, it didn’t matter very much, and even if it turned out that it did--from Peter’s point of view more, probably, than from hers--then it might not be permanent; it might not be even true, with her. She put it out of her mind.
The really important thing was to go to Peter, with the children, and start rebuilding. She would have to find out what had happened in France--not as others saw it, but as Peter saw it. It might have been not so much a separate incident as the culmination of his whole life to that point. It might have been the end of something that began with Gerry’s death, or with her own rejection of him. At any rate, he was in London, and he needed her. She would make no more plans now, beyond going to her husband.
Chapter 30
There was a long wait after she had rung the bell at 293 Nashe Street, and then Peter opened the door. He showed no surprise at seeing her and neither stepped towards her nor recoiled away from her. She held herself in check, wanting to overwhelm him with knowledge of her love, and said only: ‘Peter--I’ve come to see you.’
‘Come in,’ he said. She held up her cheek to be kissed, and after a hesitation he kissed her. She saw that he was wearing 13th Gurkhas uniform, but with no medal ribbons, and the rank badges were those of a lieutenant.
‘Let’s go upstairs,’ she said, touching his arm. He nodded, and they went up the narrow stairs together, she a little in front. When she entered the drawing-room she went quickly to the window, stooped over the old general before he could get up, and kissed him.
‘I thought you’d come,’ he said. ‘How are the children?’
‘Very well, Grandfather,’ she said. ‘I left them at home--in Minden Square, I mean.’
The old man nodded. He rose slowly to his feet, the stick trembling under his veined hand. ‘Now I will lie down,’ he said.
She made a motion of dissent, but the blue eyes glittered sharply and he said: ‘Do not be foolish, Emily. You have not come to talk about the weather? Also, I need to lie down. As I told your mother the first time you came here, I was born in the reign of King George the Fourth. There is very little I have not seen.’ He walked slowly out of the room, his stick making a small feathery noise on the carpet.
She sat down on the ornately curved sofa and quietly pulled Peter down beside her. It was a strange feeling, indeed, to direct Peter where he should go, as though he were a child. Only no child that was not exhausted to the verge of sleep or delirium would follow so unresistingly every slightest indication of a wish.
He began to speak at once. She listened and watched.
He was not mad, certainly not in any way yet known to the doctors. He was not physically ill, as Gerry had been ill when they came back from Meru. He was not angry or depressed, or perhaps inhabited by any other emotion at all. He spoke in a perfectly natural voice, with enough emphasis in the right places and sufficient changes of tone and pitch to make his recital sound quite normal. There was nothing of the sleep-talking or the trance-like monotone about it. When he related something funny that had happened, he smiled; once he laughed lightly; a few times he told of resentment over trivial injustices; but humour and resentment were emotions that he described, not ones that he felt.
At the end, when he had talked for an hour and a half, she understood quite clearly that on the battlefields of the Somme the flames of his courage and his will had burst once more into a conflagration, after he had sworn to himself that they should never do so again. He had turned defeat into victory, but he saw only death.
Somehow, somewhere, he had disposed of his strength. She fel
t that since retreating from the battlefield he had deliberately allowed himself to bleed into some kind of death of the personality. He had no strength left to make decisions of any kind. He was not trying to hide; that would have been a decision in itself, and he would know that as a result certain people-- herself perhaps included--would come to look for him. He was not trying to decide what to do next; decision was an act that had become, for him, synonymous with murder, so he had made himself incapable of deciding.
He might have suffered greatly in these past months if he had been in any other state. She did not think he had, though, because he had merely lived and waited. It had taken the authorities a long time to find out who he was because, as Peggy had said, they hadn’t believed him when he told them the truth. They’d kept him in a prison camp near Abbeville. At last the young gunner, Gale, had been sent for, and the colonel of the battalion Peter had been with, and there had been many interviews, ending with a very senior general at the War Office. She could hardly blame them for not knowing what to do, when one group of witnesses insisted that Private Smith be given the Victoria Cross and an immediate commission; a second that Private Smith be shot as a deserter; and a third, mainly politicians, urged that the whole affair must be part of some further super-secret exploit of the galvanic Colonel Savage.
In the end they had torn up the twelve recommendations for a V.C., stripped him of his acting rank, and sent him away to await shipment back to the 13th Gurkhas in Mesopotamia.
‘What will you do?’ she asked when he had finished.
‘They’re sending me back to the regiment,’ he said.
‘But I thought you didn’t want to fight any more,’ she said.
He said: ‘I don’t think I do. Just after the battle, on the Somme, I would have refused to go. I don’t feel the same now. If that’s what they think’s right, I’ll go. I’m not afraid.’
‘No,’ she said, almost absently, ‘I know that.’ He would accept another’s decision, even to go back to the war, but would not decide himself, even to refuse.
They were silent for a long time. At length he said: ‘Is the baby all right? Peggy said he was. I’m glad you called him Gerry.’
‘Gerry’s very well,’ she said. ‘He’s a lovely baby.’
Peter said: ‘Of course. . . . That was my fault too--if you can call it a fault that you tried to help Gerry, my Gerry.’
‘It wasn’t your fault,’ she said. ‘It was mine.’ The pressed- down emotion was beginning to hurt. She said: ‘Have I had nothing to do with--all this? Do you think I’ve been a doll jerking about on the end of a string that you and only you held? You aren’t responsible for everything that happens to everyone, you know.’
Peter shook his head quietly. Here was one point, at least, on which he could make a decision. It was something, she thought grimly.
He said: ‘Would you have married Gerry if I hadn’t killed him?’
She said: ‘No. Not even if you were dead. Not even if you had killed him--and you didn’t, not alone. All three of us did.’ She gathered herself. ‘Peter, do you remember what we were talking about the night the telegrams came, about the war, about Harry’s failure on Meru?’
‘Yes,’ he said at once. ‘About love. Peace. And then the telegrams came and I found that love wasn’t enough for me. I had to win.’
‘That couldn’t happen again, could it?’ she asked.
‘I don’t think so,’ he said. ‘I don’t want to win, and I physically couldn’t. What I touch, I destroy. I’m not going to touch anything.’
She said: ‘That won’t work either. You’re alive, and it’s no good trying to pretend you’re dead. I want you to apply to be released from the Army and go back to Rudwal. We can arrange that, between us.’
‘Perhaps I’d destroy Rudwal,’ he said seriously. ‘I--really, I wouldn’t know what to do that was safe.’
‘I’ll help you,’ she said.
The afternoon light shone thinly on his pale eyes. He said nothing.
She said: ‘I and the children Peter. You can’t hurt us, because we love you.’
‘That’s when you can be hurt the most,’ he said sadly.
‘It isn’t true,’ she cried. ‘You’ve got to forget and begin again, because you’re not the same person any more, any more than I am, or Peggy is. Things have happened to us, Peter. We’ve got to begin again, seeing ourselves as we are, not as we were. We must go to Rudwal because there’s a home and work there, and people who need you, the new you, more than they ever needed the old you.’
‘All right,’ he said. ‘You’ll bring Gerry?’
‘We will take Gerry,’ she said. ‘And . . . Peter, I don’t want to talk about this ever again, but you must not treat Gerry differently from the others. You mustn’t try to make amends to him or shelter him or guide him, or anything. Only love him.’
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I’m sure you’re right. I won’t bother you--I mean physically. I can’t. I tried to make love to Peggy, and----’ She interrupted quietly. ‘Peggy told me. I’m not interested one way or the other--yet. From now on all we have to do is love each other. I suppose I have been trying to guide you, in my own way, as much as you were trying to lead me. But we’ll stand together now, Peter, and I won’t have you cowering before me or anyone else. Did they take your medals away?’ He shook his head.
She said: ‘Well, put the ribbons back. You won’t be in uniform long.’ She stood up. ‘Will you come home with me now?’
‘If you want me to,’ he said readily.
‘No,’ she answered, watching him as he rose to his feet, so that he stood a little taller than she. ‘You must decide.’
There was no light now, not even the old glacial cold, in his eyes. After a time, the words coming slowly up from the depths, he said: ‘Yes. I’d like to come--if you think it’s best.’
‘I do,’ she said.
He said: ‘I’ll tell Grandfather. I suppose he’ll be surprised.’
She said: ‘I don’t think so. He’s lived a long time. Where are your clothes?’
Chapter 31
LETTERS FROM INDIA
D.C.’S BUNGALOW
RUDWAL, PUNJAB
May 2nd, 1917
Dear Grandfather,
It is a fortnight since we arrived back here, but we have been so busy settling in that I have had no time to write. I am sure you will understand. The children are still excited and a little overwrought by all the travelling, and they are finding India quite strange. Well, even Rodney was only two when we left in ‘14. They have had no actual illness, though, nor have Peter or I. It is just as well, as there is so much to do. All our old staff were waiting for us, except the masalchi, who had graduated to khansama with a family in Manali.
People were very good to us all the way up. Many who had known Peter in the old days went out of their way to be nice. I nearly cried once or twice, because I wasn’t expecting it. When we got to Rudwal at last there was a tremendous to-do, with all sorts of people who had probably never spoken to each other for years getting together to make a big reception at the station, with a band and a ton of garlands. The Old Captain was there, in command so to speak, and Adam Khan his son, and Dr Parkash, and Harnarayan the Congress leader, who was one of the firebrands of the old C.G.G. but now seems to have turned into a politician. (I am sorry, I don’t suppose Peter told you anything about the C.G.G. It was an organization to improve co-operation between the government and the people, but it finally broke up early in the war and most of its members, including Adam Khan, joined the Congress Party. Adam Khan was the local Congress leader until early this year, but at their last elections Harnarayan beat him.)
Now I suppose you are wondering why I know so much about the politics here! Well, I promised Peter before we left England that I would take more interest in his work, so that he could have someone to talk to about it instead of just having to brood by himself. I am sure it helps anyone a lot to be able to talk about problems. I found out all I could
while we were in Lahore, and have been doing the same here.
To get back to the reception at the station--there were several speeches, ranging from Adam Khan’s little Horatian gem to fifteen minutes of blood and thunder Punjabi from the Old Captain (delivered while glaring at his son and Harnarayan). Everyone seems overjoyed to have Peter back, even Harnarayan, although he did hint politely that his reason for being pleased was to find a foeman worthy of his steel holding the reins here. The hospital Peter was working so hard at has been built and the nurses’ school started, in a small way. Dr Parkash’s speech was very short. He just shouted: ‘Now we will get the girls coming in to the school, eh?’ I do wish you could meet him.
The truth is that everyone is keyed up to do great things, now that Peter is back. The Congress people know they won’t be able to get away with vague slogans any more, but will have to be precise and bold. The air is quite electric with readiness. It is wonderful--and terrifying. I am hoping against hope that it will rouse Peter to be what they all expect him to be.
Llyn Gared has not been sold yet. I have been tempted to take it off the market and keep it as a place we could go to if we had to ... I mean, when Peter retires. But the truth is we are no longer rich. My shares have gone down a lot, and I simply don’t think we are going to be able to afford a place like that as well as the London house, even in another year or two. Also, I think I would feel sad if we went back there and tried to live in that kind of isolation from the world, as squires of Llyn Gared. It’s not possible any more, because of what has happened to us. Daddy didn’t say anything about it in his will. I only hope that whoever buys it will love mountains and Wales as he and Mally did.
The war seems very far away here, but I think we will get a different impression when we go on tour into the villages. There has been very heavy enlistment from the district, and we have suffered a lot of casualties, particularly in Mesopotamia.
