My Dear I Wanted to Tell You (24 page)

They were already sprouting head hair, in a direction not entirely concomitant with a natural beard.

Rose was very gentle when she cleaned his face.

Riley did not look at it; neither did he go among the other men.

*

April

Dear Nadine,
When I think it is four years since I was in France, and that it has all been going on since then, I can hardly bear to think it. But it must end, Nadine, think only of that, it will end, and we will win. We’ve known that since the Americans came in . . . bit by bit.

I shall write to you whether you write to me or not, because here I am helping to mend and rebuild, and life is much easier than it is for you out there. Stay strong, Nadine.

Rose

April

Dear Rose,
Thank you. I think sometimes I would rather die than ever see a broken boy again.

May

Dear Nadine,
If it helps you at all I wouldn’t mind if you wanted to let it out in your letters to me. I know it is almost impossible to talk about such things over there. Write it all to me, I can take it. If there is one thing I have learnt in this place, it is that talking – or writing, when they can’t talk – vastly improves a fellow’s chances of recovery. Some stay silent and it is like a wound uncleaned, an abscess undrained. There is a girl, Dorothy, who comes up in the afternoons bringing cigarettes for the men: she chats to them, whether they can talk back or not. The same with Mr Scott the barber, and his boy Albert (who also doubles as the men’s bookmaker, though I’m not sure I’m meant to know that), always chatting. We always keep the notebooks handy. Sometimes, when someone talks who has not talked before, or picks up a pencil when previously he has looked on it as an enemy, a badge of his disability, it makes me want to laugh and cry and kiss them. Lady Driffield comes by every week now to work with the men writing down their stories. It is so restorative. They have even set up a newspaper! Did I tell you about the Christmas show? Several of the surgeons appeared in it, and some are also on the football team. Of course it is not all good news. Jock Anderson celebrated his fiftieth operation by getting what Major Fry calls Incurably Cheerful, and breaking every window in the hospital. But then an officer came back to visit who has a two-inch piece of rib in his jaw, and he was breaking brazil nuts for us with his teeth. Sometimes I can hardly believe their courage. Major Gillies inspires them so, and makes it possible for them to believe that they can have a future despite the problems.

Some, of course, still do not want to communicate.

She means Riley. She does. That’s her way of telling me he is still there. She would have found a way to tell me if he weren’t. He hasn’t gone to Paris. I suppose they write to each other. The girl must speak English then – his French wouldn’t get them very far. Perhaps she is English. Why wouldn’t she be? She’s English. They’ll marry and have babies and I will see them all strolling down the Broad Walk together on Sunday mornings and I’ll have to say hello – STOP IT.

June
Dear Rose,
We are moving up to the front tomorrow, to be closer, to be more use. But I have come to the conclusion that you are braver than I, because you admit the possibility of recovery, and you fight and work for it every day, with your optimism and your cheerfulness. The German armies we are told are falling apart in the champagne cellars of the Marne and the chicken farms, eating and getting drunk and stealing hats and writing home, but there is still a constant supply of boys for me to do no good for. I just roll like a little cog in the machinery. No conscientious objector could do what I do. I am as bad as the Generals of the Somme and Passchendaele. I am as bad as Haig. I am not helping the boys to live.

June

Dear Nadine,
I don’t think you have had any leave yet – perhaps you have and I have not heard from you about it. I think you need some. You are getting morbid. At least get a change of scene – go to Paris or somewhere fun. If you do go, look out for my cousin Peter, Major Peter Locke. He’s been seconded to an office there after almost three years at the front. If you do, let me know how you find him. We haven’t seen him for such a long time and he is one of those types who when he is home says very little about what is really going on, and just wants to go out to jolly places and have fun. Julia worries about him, and to be honest so do I. I dare say he’s fine but he hardly writes and we haven’t seen him.

Leave?? Has Rose not looked at the papers?

*

His flap had taken. Clean, alive, good blood supply, no shrinking or shrivelling. His pedicles had been cut, flattened out, and reapplied to the side of his head, halving in one move the area of deforested scalp. And in the jaw, there was some movement. He could eat a little – not chewing, but he had developed a method of mashing soft food against the roof of his mouth. He could swallow. False teeth were talked of.

He could murmur and hum. His tongue had been traumatised for so long that it had forgotten what to do. Rose sat by him. ‘Say, la la la.’

He would raise an eyebrow.

‘Ba ba ba,’ she said. ‘You don’t need a jaw to talk. It comes from the throat. The Allies are counter-attacking. Did you see the paper? I’ll drop it by later.’

He tried it out,
la la la
, late at night, when she wasn’t there, when nobody could hear. His tongue lay like a dead thing, but a tiny little noise, creaky, ancient, came out of his tight, immobile mouth. He sounded disgusting and pathetic.

He practised the mashing movement against his palate. Lifting, collapsing. Pushing, letting fall.

*

A Colonel Masters was wounded. He was to go to Paris. A nurse was to accompany him. It was to be Nadine. ‘Why me?’ she asked Matron.

‘Because you, my child, are the one most likely to collapse on the job here. Don’t hurry back. You might try getting a night’s sleep, for example.’

*

She stared at the snoring colonel in the carriage. He didn’t need her. The train threw her body around.

By what authority do they do this to us?

*

Paris. Summer. Oh God, oh God. Leaves. Roses. Little dogs. Pretty hats. Children.

Faint remnants of things she had once been going to do lurched around the back of her memory. Galleries. Van Gogh. Sir Alfred. Papa’s friend Lady Scott, the sculptor, who had lived here ten years ago and used to say, ‘I’ll take you there one day, darling, when you’re a bit bigger, and we’ll go and have tea with Rodin. We’ll take him pomegranates.’

She delivered the colonel to a nursing home. She stayed at the recommended
pension
near the Pont Louis Philippe. She went to look at her mother’s childhood neighbourhood near the Place des Vosges, and wondered, looking around, about the past, and why her mother had said so little about it: but she was glad for the moment that if she had any unknown cousins in the neighbourhood they remained unknown. She took her uniform to a laundress. She ate two croissants with jam and drank a bowl of coffee so rich and milky it clagged her mouth. She slept for twenty-four hours in clean sheets, waking every hour or so, sometimes in tears, dreaming about flowers and fires intertwined. She found the number, and rang it, her heart beating strongly, and said: ‘May I speak to Major Locke, please?’

He came on the line.

‘Hello, Major Locke, my name is Nadine Waveney.’

A pause.

‘I am a friend of your cousin Rose.’ She liked saying that. They were friends.

‘No, you’re not,’ he said. ‘You’re Riley Purefoy’s girl.’

She dropped the telephone. Almost squawked. The joy, the bittersweet joy, of hearing herself described so.

She picked it up again. ‘Hello?’ she said.

‘Hello,’ he said. ‘So sorry, that didn’t come out quite right. Um. Friend of Rose’s?’

‘I’m here in Paris,’ she said. ‘I’ve been at Étaples. Rose suggested I look you up.’

‘Well, find a cab and come over. We’ll have lunch – take the cab on. Good,’ he said, and hung up.

*

The brasserie was curled and mirrored, white-linened and clean-glassed. Shining dark wood panels, cool grey marble table-tops. Everything was so solid. The air was drunk with the smell of garlic in melting butter. Waiters burst through doors, pushing them open with a hip, carrying ice-piled platters of oysters and mussels and
crevettes gris
and little langoustines, their frondlike extremities fanned as if they were still underwater. Beautiful women slunk around in fur coats. Officers smoked cigars and drank. Chicken was two francs a plate. There was chicken. Nadine could not quite believe that such parallel universes lived alongside each other, so close, so far.

Major Locke was tall and blond and stooped, gentle, courteous. ‘Let’s have champagne,’ he said. ‘You probably deserve it. I’m sure you do.’ It was not his first drink of the day.

My God, what a girl. Not obvious in any way, but plenty of SA there.

Nadine drank three beautiful wide glasses of bittersweet champagne, very quickly. So cold. So beautiful.

Locke watched her. ‘You look like you need a meal,’ he said. ‘What will you have?’

‘Steak,’ she said. ‘Rare.’

‘And to start?’

‘Sole meunière.’ At the next table, a group of glamorous people were arguing about classicalism and romanticism. An
abbé
was saying, ‘What’s the fuss? I wake every morning classical, and fall asleep every night romantic!’ A wave of laughter crashed up and over. Nadine caught her breath, and gave a tiny hysterical laugh.

‘And oysters, I think,’ said Major Locke, ‘just to get us going.’

She could hardly bear it. It was all so beautiful. Living, extravagant loveliness flooding around her as though Étaples didn’t exist.

‘I miss him so much,’ she said. ‘I love him so much. I have hardly seen him – I haven’t seen him since July last year. I tried – I went to Sidcup to the hospital but he wouldn’t see me. He wrote to me – he said there was a girl in Paris he was in love with and as soon as he was out of hospital he was going to come here to be with her . . .’

Locke’s mouth fell open. What the . . . ‘Miss Waveney,’ he said.

She stopped in mid-flow. ‘I’m awfully sorry,’ she said.

‘Miss Waveney, I was wondering how – indeed, whether – to tell you without embarrassing you that I used to have to read the letters he sent you . . .’

‘I know. He used to put little messages to you in them. It made me laugh so much. So you know all my secrets. You know all about me . . .’

‘Well, some things . . . I have had to read a lot of letters . . .’

‘I know you know,’ she said. ‘Have you seen him?

‘Not since . . . not since he was wounded.’ He remembered Riley’s wound. He was thinking. There was no girl in Paris. Riley hadn’t even been to Paris. He had not had time to acquire a girl. And he was in love, so in love, with Nadine.

‘He said it wasn’t serious,’ she said. ‘His wound.’

‘Well, no, it wasn’t,’ said Major Locke.

‘Oh.’

She sighed out of her nose. ‘So do you know where he is now? Is he still in hospital?’

‘I don’t know. Is he?’

‘Rose isn’t allowed to tell me.’

‘Perhaps it is taking a little longer to heal than they expected.’

‘Ten months!’ she said. ‘Or perhaps he has left now. Perhaps he – oh!’

‘What?’

The oysters arrived.

‘Perhaps he is here.’

‘I haven’t seen him.’

‘He’ll be with her. They’ll be in bed,’ she said boldly.

‘Dear girl,’ he said.

‘And of course you’re Julia’s husband, aren’t you?’ she said suddenly. She had so much she wanted to say but all her thoughts, her capacity to think, even, were shattered and rattled by the months of shelling, the gunfire, the fear, the deaths. Her mind was shaking. It had been for months. She poured an oyster down her throat and looked up at him.

‘Yes,’ he said.

‘She was very kind to me.’

‘She is a very kind woman.’

‘I stayed at your house! When Riley re-re-re-rejected me. I was upset . . .’

‘Well, I hope you come again in happier times,’ he said, and lifted his glass, and drained it. It soothed him to have an excuse for getting drunk. A very good excuse, actually.

‘Bong jaw, Locke!’ said a man passing by, an English officer, with an almost invisible leer at Nadine. ‘Who’s your pretty friend? Your friends are always so pretty . . .’ He stopped at their table, and grinned.

Locke tightened his elbows, holding them in to his sides, resisting the urge to punch the man. He leant back instead.

Nadine glanced at the officer. At Major Locke.

Locke was toying with his glass, looking at it, twirling the stem a little. He looked up at the man. ‘She’s a nursing member of the VAD,’ he said gently, ‘stationed at Étaples where she deals daily with our mortally wounded comrades. This is her first leave – and probably her first decent meal – in six months. Her fiancé is in hospital in England, having had his face blown off at Passchendaele. Her father is the conductor Sir Robert Waveney, who raises all that money with the Patriotic Benefit Concerts. Anything else you want to know?’