My Dear I Wanted to Tell You (13 page)

Chapter Eleven

Sidcup and France, September 1916

It looks like the moon
, Julia thought, not for the first time, sitting back on her bed, her dressing-gown falling. It was so very round and white and . . .
full . . . sort of waxy and gleaming . . .
Her legs poked out, beyond it, beyond her reach. She lifted her left foot, and waved at herself with it over the mound of her belly.
Quite extraordinary.
But, even more extraordinary, it was perfectly normal. Perfectly normal. To have a tiny baby growing inside your own body – just in there, with fingernails and a bottom and everything. She laughed – and felt a responding wriggle from the creature within, tight under the marbly moonish skin. It was rather disgusting.

In there.

Soon to be out here.

Extraordinary.

But the nobility of her situation pleased her. The smiles everybody gave her, grateful for the promise of an actual christening rather than news of a distant funeral; for a baby not a corpse. Brave, fecund wife; brave, wounded husband. The war would end. He would come back. They would have their child and everything would be as it should be. The pain and loneliness would be redeemed in domestic bliss. It was quite easy, actually, when a man was not there, to make him, in your mind, all that you wanted him to be.

A letter lay on her nightstand. It was one of several, all very similar, formulaic, comforting but somehow distant, separated from her by a film of something, a wafting, inscrutable chasm that she dutifully ignored.

My dear Julia
Sorry to have been quiet for a while. I’m pretty well; I am still considerably north of where we were and my leg, if anything, is better than it was before. Loss of blood was the worst of it, and apparently I have had enough time now to make pints more, so with the rest and good food and so on I am an improved model, apart from the headaches. I wanted you to know that I am thinking of you, my dear, as your time draws near. To think, out here, of a little baby is almost impossible. I just hope and pray that it is not too hard a time for you, and that our child is brought into the world swiftly and safely. I am hoping to have some leave, of course, and will let you know as soon as anything comes through.

Your Peter

Why not take such things at face value, if face value works, and between-the-lines makes unsettling reading?

*

Mrs Orris, sitting on Peter’s chair in the drawing room, had been talking for nearly an hour. Nothing interrupted her flow. Julia, sitting back on the pale chintz sofa, uncomfortable and huge among the cushions, did not find it strange. Her mother had always done it, was doing it now, would always do it. Early on in life Julia had noticed that her father never listened to her mother. She assumed her mother had acquired the habit as a result. Perhaps she hoped that if she went on long enough someone, somewhere, someday, would take notice of her. Julia had always taken notice of her. She had no choice. But Julia’s attention didn’t count for anything with Mrs Orris.

The powdery white jowl bobbed and fluttered. She had recently replaced her former favourite subject, ‘Get Julia to do some war work’, with a new one, ‘Get Julia to move closer to home now she is having a baby’. Or, more precisely, and though neither Mrs Orris nor her daughter would ever put it this way, she had moved from ‘make Julia feel bad about being unable to stick at any war work’ to ‘make Julia feel bad about being unwilling to move closer to what her mother persisted in calling home although Julia had left there several years ago as an adult to live with her husband’.

‘You see, it’s really not safe,’ she was saying, not for the first time. ‘You’re right in the path of the Hun if – God forbid! – they were to invade, but, even if they don’t, with these airships they come straight up to London to drop their horrible bombs and you’re right in the way, which is bad enough when it’s just you but with a little one, you have to learn to be a bit responsible, with Peter away, and of course you can’t just turn around and ask him, as he’s not here . . .’

Yes, Mother, I know . . .

‘. . . so you really have to grow up a little and buckle down and do your bit, because it really is irresponsible to try to live in this big place all on your own, when you could just come home and Margaret can mind the baby and you can have a good rest to get you back on your feet and you’ll be safe, which must be what Peter wants most of all . . .’

Julia wondered briefly why her mother thought she had a direct line to what Peter was thinking, when she, Julia, hadn’t, if she was honest, had the slightest idea what he was thinking since 1914.

‘. . . and when that awful hospital opens, I mean obviously it’s not awful but one wants to be able to go for a walk without . . . and I do hope, darling, that you’ve been sensible because, really, a shock like that is the kind of thing which can bring on a baby at a bad moment. I’m sure that you won’t walk up that way but, you know, there’s nothing wrong with their legs, and you can’t avoid everyone in a blue suit – I mean, why would you? They are heroes, obviously, but we have to be realistic so, really, I do think it was silly of you not to come up to Berkshire earlier, and now it really is too late for you to travel but as
soon
. . .’

Julia was not worried about the new hospital. She’d read the article in the paper. Facial injuries did sound awful but, as the journalist had said, if you’ve got trenches . . . She quite often found herself imagining the scene: a moonlit night, a British helmet, a lifted chin, a cigarette, a Hun sniper . . .
oh, don’t be disgusting . . .
No, surgery to rebuild a face sounded marvellous to her – like a miracle. The surgeon sounded quite heroic, and was very nice-looking in the photos.

‘I’m going to have a rest, Mother,’ she said, and tried to push herself up out of the sofa with both arms, elbows akimbo like a great grasshopper.

Her mother, fussing around her, still talking, made her stay put.

Julia conceded.

In her dozing dream a man in a blue suit with no face was holding her tight round her hips, squeezing her with his strong arms, letting go, squeezing her again. His arms were very warm.

Her mother was still talking as Julia felt a single great blow inside her, a donkey kick, a shock.

She called out, a great gasp of surprise. The moon was shivering. The floodgates opened. Her thighs, the sofa, were suddenly awash – not blood: clear, like seawater.

Now it begins. Thank God. Get this vastness out of me, and give me back my body.

She wished to God her mother would go away, and Rose come.

*

Locke Hill, Kent,
September 1916

My dear Son in Law,

Well, it has certainly been a very exciting day here, and you will be delighted to hear that you are now a father. I won’t bore you with the details, but you should know Julia is a bit under the weather with it all. I will of course stay and look after her. I know you were thinking Harry for a boy, by which of course you mean Henry, so should we go ahead with that?

In haste –

your very affectionate mother in law,

Jane Orris

*

France
My dear Julia,
I just received your mother’s letter. I am thinking of you all now, tucked up at home. A baby is such an alien idea to me here, surrounded only by men and warfare. Take care of him well, and of yourself, dear girl, and when I return let us take things up again as a happy family. I am happy to think of a new little creature, in the middle of so much that is destructive. That said, life goes along pretty ordinarily out here. Don’t worry about me.

He screwed up the letter in order to copy it out again, leaving out the last sentence. She didn’t worry about him. She hated him – with good reason. He couldn’t begin to address this in letters. He couldn’t, whatever she said in her letters, pretend it wasn’t so. Every word had been game but brittle, with the gay clarity of ‘Oh, that doesn’t matter at all!’ as if it were up to her alone to decide whether, or understand if, it mattered or not. He was damned if he was going to accept this hollow, unsubstantiated, rubber-stamp forgiveness. He didn’t deserve any kind of forgiveness.

But with a baby in the scales, didn’t everything now have to rebalance?

He glanced up. His lamp was guttering and he happened to know the billet was short of oil. If his wound had been worse, he could have been with them now, talking, proving, earning, building, loving, being . . .
Don’t think about it. You’re here. Because you’re here because you’re here because you’re here – NO – you’re here to make sure your child has a future as an English boy in an English England.

‘I don’t like Henry,’ he wrote.

The name just jumped into his mind. ‘Please name him Thomas.’

Tom Locke, my baby son.

‘Purefoy,’ he yelled. He signed off: ‘Send me a picture. It would be a nice thing to have.’

Then he wished he hadn’t written it, because it sounded as if he wanted to see the child before he was killed. He read it through again. Everything in the letter sounded all wrong. Should he write that? No. That would be even worse. ‘Your loving husband, Peter’.

‘Purefoy,’ he yelled again, and Purefoy stuck his head in through the door.

‘Purefoy, read my letter, would you?’ Locke disappeared behind the screen in the corner, and the sound of splashing came through.

Purefoy read the letter.

Locke came out shirtless, scrubbing at his head with a thin white towel. ‘Is it all right?’ he said.

‘What – you having a son, sir? It’s bloody marvellous.’

Locke grinned a little, and raised his eyebrows. ‘Mmm,’ he said, and pulled out a new shirt. ‘Umm. The letter.’

‘It’s fine, sir,’ said Purefoy. It wasn’t. This rather unusual man presented a shallow version of himself . . .
but not everyone can express themselves well on paper. And perhaps that’s what she wants from him.

Purefoy had in his pocket his most recent letter from Nadine:

My dear dear boy,
This shyness is crippling my letters – I have so little time to write, so much I could say, and I am all the time thinking of not saying things which will make you unhappy, like not talking about the war, because I don’t want to remind you of it – as if you had forgotten. But people here do forget it, and it makes me furious, as I’m sure it would you – there, you see, something else I should not say. So what is safe to say? Only the most dangerous thing of all. How much I love you. I completely love you. Is it just because I need something to love? NO – it is because of you, from your first grin up that tree, to every funny or intelligent or beautiful thing you have ever said to me, your courage and strength, and your weakness too – I’m sure you must have some weakness – well, yes, I know you do – but, do you know, my love for you is like a living thing I keep in my pocket and late at night, or in the middle of some hard dull task, I think of it, or take it out. I can last a day with that in my pocket, and a day is all there is. And in the morning, it is still there. I am so proud to be loved by you.

Now I have to go and wash some sheets. Ever more, ever more, more sheets, more love, ever more,
your Nat

In his other pocket was a letter he was about to post to her:

Dearest Nadine, girl of my heart

Yesterday I imagined that your father was standing over my shoulder as I wrote you that last letter – the rather warm letter – or perhaps over your shoulder as you read it. I know there is NO POINT in thinking about all the troubles which may come. I told you, I think, about my friend Ainsworth – before July the First of cursed memory he showed me a kind of prayer he carried with him, a gift from his wife, along the lines of Courage for the big troubles, Patience for the small ones and when you have done your duty sleep peacefully and be of good cheer . . . Major Locke brought it to me in the hospital. Ainsworth had asked that I should have it. So I sit, when I have a chance to sit, and think that the end of the day is the end of the day . . . though of course here the end of the day is not the end of the day, it is the beginning of the night, and the night has its own livelinesses. Am I making sense? You would think that compared with here the idea of your father would not be so frightening, wouldn’t you?

Do you see Sir Alfred at all? If you can, please go to him and tell him of my affection and respect. I have such kind letters from him – he seems not to mind at all when I am silent for long periods. I owe him so much, and God only knows how I can ever repay him – of course he thinks I am repaying him by being here, and of course I think that I was here anyway, so that hardly counts. I have told him a little of the madness that sent me away so rudely in the first place, and a little of the madness here – though you know, my darling, I think I am not going mad after all. I feared I was – but now I see, I have seen since July 1
^st
, that to go mad would be the only sane response so I need not. Does that make sense?