My Dear I Wanted to Tell You (26 page)

‘Of course not,’ said Julia.

She too hoped it wasn’t the flu. The flu was killing people faster than the war. She felt . . . strange.

‘It’s really nearly over now, isn’t it, mum?’ said Mrs Joyce.

‘Yes – I . . .’ Julia realised she didn’t know what to think.

‘And the major coming home, mum,’ said Mrs Joyce.

‘Yes,’ said Julia, almost hysterically.
If he’d only deign to tell us when.

‘And Mrs Orris called, mum. She said to say she’d be bringing the little one on Saturday week.’

‘What?’

‘Master Tom, mum, she’ll be bringing him on Saturday week.’

‘Yes,’ said Julia. Tom. Peter. Christmas. Peace. The appalling potential of the situation made her almost swoon. What was a woman meant to do with so much normality?

She went upstairs and turned on her bath, and started the ritual, staring at herself in the mirror: from the front, from the side, from the other side. Waist: slender. Bust: elegant yet alluring. Hair: still long. Peter preferred it that way.
I should have been a better kind of woman for him. I should have loved him better. I am pathetic – they’re right about me.

Tom!

Close-up: on the body, on the face. Left side, right side. Her jaw was all right for now. Her nose was charming with its little imperfection. Eyes vast and blue.

A thought skittered across the surface of her mind, like a water boatman across a pool, brittle, delicate, alarming:
IT DOESN’T BLOODY WELL MATTER!

For a moment, her beautiful eyes showed absolute fear.

Gone.

Of course it matters. Something has to matter. It has always mattered. If it didn’t matter, then what, after all, was the point of her?
It’s the only thing I have.

*

Rose popped in. She’d had a note from Peter.

Julia jumped up. ‘Any firmer news on when he’s coming? Or where he is?’

‘I don’t know, Julia,’ Rose replied. ‘He didn’t say exactly.’ The phrase lay on the air softly, drifting, unfinished.

Well
, thought Julia.
That’s good. It could be good. He’ll turn up when he’s ready. For goodness’ sake, what difference does it make after all this time? It’s not a problem.
‘Well,’ she said smartly, ‘it’s not as if we haven’t got plenty to do without him.’ She hadn’t breathed properly in days. Little brittle panting breaths. No wonder everyone hated her.

She half didn’t even want to see him. And Tom! She was terrified.

Chapter Twenty-Five

Sidcup and Wigan, November 1918

The war, after dragging its tail around for weeks like a dying serpent, crawled into the armistice, and was, if you could muster faith in that, over. For those not closely involved, felicity was unconfined. The maroons went off. The lights came on. The bells rang out. The bunting went up. The champagne went down. There was talk of who was coming home, and when. Talk, once again, of being home for Christmas. For the rest, felicity was complicated by disbelief, bereavement, unhealed wounds, location, unspent contracts, logistics of travel, and the vast immobility of the vast body of the machine and bureaucracy of war.

At Sidcup, the news brought much laughing and cheering and clapping each other on the back, and sudden inclinations to be best friends. Though the patients were all stuck there as long as they were stuck there, they were at least released now from the War Office’s requirement that they stay there all the time between operations.

Riley thought:
But there’s no reason to believe it won’t start up again at any moment. It’s only an armistice. And even if it is real, lovely for some people but so what for us? It’s rather uncouth of us to be such living reminders that, over though the war may be – um, what was the right word? – aspects of the war are not over at all and never will be.

Someone said,
Come, come, lad, it’s over!

Riley had had more than a year to forget all the things he couldn’t forget, and to get used to the things he was going to have to get used to. But so far the outside world, a world of peace, the new world, whatever it was going to be, had not been part of that. It was not something he cared to ponder. Riley thought:
Before, while it was still on, I was Captain Purefoy, wounded soldier. Who am I to be now? Mr Purefoy, disabled ex-serviceman?
His age rang through his head like the tolling of a bell. Twenty-two, twenty-two, twenty-two. There was an awfully long time ahead of him.

On the day the armistice was announced, he was remembering Jack Ainsworth (over). He had taken his Small Book (over) out of his officer’s valise (over) two days before, and Ainsworth’s scrap of paper had fallen out. Riley, who knew off by heart the words on it, nevertheless read it again, where it fell on his white sheet. (Whitesheet, Plugstreet, Zonnebeke and Pop . . .) (Over.)

Courage for the big troubles in life, patience for the small. And when you have laboriously finished your day’s efforts, go to sleep in peace.

(Be of good cheer. God is awake.)

It wasn’t Jack’s writing. It was Sybil’s. Riley knew because he had censored enough of Jack’s letters (over): long, fond letters, missing her, missing the children, sending love (over) to so many people, by name. Admitting he was bored. No mention of the fear and the horror (over). Longing, longing for home (over). Finding it in him to say, ‘The smell of the apple trees is lovely here.’

Riley was not of good cheer. He didn’t know what good cheer was. Was finding the smell of the apple trees lovely good cheer?

He glanced out of the window. There were trees outside. They were not burnt and sharp and black. (Over.)

Courage. Patience. Efforts. Laboriously. Good cheer. Peace.

Jack Ainsworth’s voice:
You could give it a go, lad.

Ainsworth, Couch, Ferdinand, Dowland and many more (over). And the smell: over. And the noise. Over.

For the next few days he watched the other patients.
Patience.
He was looking for good cheer among them. How did they bear it?
How could they bear it?
This was not a rhetorical question. He wanted to know how the others bore it, what they actually did to bear it, because he could not bear it. And he could not suddenly start to bear it just because
It
was over. No one ever wins a war, and wars are never over.

He had dreamt he’d sent a telegram to Ainsworth saying, ‘Please come back and bring the boys,’ and Ainsworth had replied, ‘All right see you on Saturday.’

Over.

That afternoon, in the garden, a young gunner, a Welshman, with no nose, turned to him, and said: ‘Captain, you’ve been staring at us for months. You never come out, and when you do you stare at us. Give it a rest, now, would you? You’re giving me the willies.’

Riley stared. Another man clapped his shoulder, and said: ‘Never mind him, old man. He’s just a bit upset. He lost his nose, you know.’ And they all started laughing, except the Welshman, who looked as if he were about to hit someone.

I’m making it worse for them
, Riley thought.

He was so, so bored. Bored of misery, of anger, of why-me, of poor-me, of what’s-the-point, of self-deception and of stoicism and of waiting for a miracle; bored of his mother’s letters saying how brave he is, bored of his cruelty in not replying to her – what could he say?
No, mother, bravery implies a choice, a cowardly alternative, and, mother, if there had been an alternative I would have taken it, really I would
. He was bored of egg; of his misery in his speechlessness, of debating with himself whether suicide was the brave or the cowardly choice. Bored of being unable to discuss this, or anything else, with anyone. Bored of inflicting his misery on other people.

But if you don’t die, you have to live.

You have to live.

In which case, what?

Be of good cheer?

*

When Rose came, Riley gave her a letter:

Dear Major Gillies,
Having been here for over a year, under orders, I would like to apply for leave. Four or five days should do. Could you let me know how to go about it, under the circumstances? I think I will need one of Archie Lane’s masks, which I understand could take a little while to organise.

Yours sincerely

Capt. R. Purefoy

He gestured to Rose that she could read it.

*

Gillies called him in. ‘Why d’you want a mask?’ he said. ‘Nasty things. Hot, uncomfortable, and an admission of my failure. Be patient, Purefoy, and you’ll be presentable in the end. To be honest, though I’m glad you want to go out, I’m not sure you’re ready. Have you been to the village at all? To the pub, walks?’

Riley shook his head.

‘What will you do about communicating?’

Riley lifted his notebook.

‘But it’s not just a physical thing, old man – you’re out of practice. I know you talk to Rose . . .’

Riley liked his loose use of the word ‘talk’.

‘. . . but you’re not exactly the chatty type.’ Gillies cocked an eyebrow at him, waiting for a response.

Riley blinked, and wrote:

I haven’t had very much to say. I wouldn’t have had anyway. But there is someone I want to talk to. I need to visit them, and don’t want to scare them. Then I’ll come back.

Gillies read it. ‘What about food?’ he asked. ‘It’s very easy to become malnourished, and that would be very bad news. I’ve worked hard on you, Purefoy, and we have more to do. I would like you to be a success. Are you motivated enough to feed yourself properly?’

Riley wrote:

soup

and Gillies said, ‘How are you going to get it down?’

Riley wrote:

by embarrassing slurping in private

A little shot of joy ran through Gillies. Sign of a sense of humour. The best possible sign.

Because of Riley’s quiet insistence, Lane and young Mickey Shirlaw, the miner from Motherwell who’d arrived as a patient and was well on the way to being a dental technician, made him a mask. It was as unpleasant to wear as Gillies had said it would be, and in the end Riley didn’t take it with him when he went.

*

Jarvis was back, to have his great ham-nose restyled a little. Mrs Jarvis had complained of his snoring, and he even woke himself up. Major Gillies had been happy to oblige.

‘Glad you’re going out, Purefoy,’ Jarvis said. ‘Here – have this.’ He was brandishing a slender metal tube about eighteen inches long. ‘I made it for Jamison, in the workshop, from a bit of shell casing. Brass. From Hill 62.’

Rose passed it over. It was beautiful. Jarvis had chased a pattern in spirals round and round its length.

Purefoy nodded his thanks.

Jarvis said, ‘You’re welcome.’

Have they always been kind?
Riley wondered. He drank his egg-flip through the brass straw that night, and used it to rinse his mouth in the bathroom afterwards.
Don’t forget the sulcus. You have a sulcus now. It’s the gap between the flesh of the lower lip and the mandible. Keep it clean.

*

One of the anaesthetists was going up to London in his motor-car, and dropped Riley at Euston station. ‘Good luck, Captain,’ he said, and Riley nodded.

He had his wound stripes, his pips and a scarf. He wound it high.

He glanced around. City streets. Crowd. Jesus Christ, what a racket. What a mob. Jesus.

He put himself with his back to the wall and breathed carefully. Here is the world. Here is London. Here are the people. The war is over. He knew absolutely nothing about it.
You’re twenty-two years old, Riley, and it all starts here, like this.

Only as the train pulled into Wigan North Western did Riley think he should have written to her. He’d scare the daylights out of her. Even if he looked all right, just turning up out of the blue would give her a shock . . . Damn. He should write now, deliver the letter, stay somewhere, wait till he heard from her . . .

The town was busy. He came out into the street: men, women, wagons, girls, children. Mill chimneys loomed beyond, and the air was metallic. He’d never been in the north before, but the accent he knew well: the great troops of scrawny tough boys in big caps, with dirty jokes and big hands, railwaymen and miners and factory hands. Ainsworth’s voice had been something between the Manchesters and the Liverpool Irish.

‘La la la la ba ba ba,’ Riley murmured, behind his scarf, and crossed the road to the Swan and Railway. Beautiful stained-glass panels: a swan, almost embracing a steam train in its snowy wings.
Like Leda and Zeus
, he thought.
Now who was that by . . . Burne Jones? And that one at the British Museum . . .
It was a strange, surreal pairing. He liked it. He breathed deeply as he entered the fuggy room, and went up to the bar. He took out his notebook – a new one – and wrote:

Brown ale please. Do you have rooms?

He tore out the page and passed it across to the waiter, who was polishing a glass. The waiter glanced down at it, then at Riley, and said: ‘What’s the matter? Cat got your tongue?’

Riley stared at him. A feeling of cold rose up his body. He leant forward, putting his elbows on the bar, and resting his precious chin carefully on his hands, the scarf wrapped round it. The cuffs of his sleeves, with their assorted pips and stripes – his promotions, his wounds, his years overseas, his pre-1915 – were right there for the fellow’s information.
Does he not know there’s been a war?

The man was grinning at him.

‘Well, do you want a drink or not?’ he said.

Riley glanced down at the note, and back at him.

‘I can’t read,’ the man said, with a smirk, eyeballing. ‘You’ll need to take that scarf off and talk, like a human being.’

It was all Riley needed. His arm snaked out across the bar and punched the little squit in the face.

Warmth flooded him.

Concentric circles.

The man reeled.

Stop.

Riley stood back suddenly, holding his arm as if to restrain it. He was breathless. He wanted to say sorry. He felt a light come into his eyes, and an unaccustomed feeling across his cheekbones, which he identified as a smile.

‘Right,’ said the waiter. ‘Get out.’ He touched his jaw. ‘Piss off.’ He had picked up a glass, cowering, aggressive.

It’s not his fault; he doesn’t know
, Riley thought. Then:
He ought to be able to tell.

Riley felt his eyes smiling, his cheeks stretching.
Sorry
, he thought.
But you asked for it. And now I will know the truth.
He took off his hat, and put it on the bar. His hair was a little longer than the army would normally prefer, but the curls didn’t hide the shining scarred stripe over the back. He unwrapped his scarf, keeping his eyes steady on the waiter.

As the scarf dropped, the man gasped. His hands fell suddenly, heavily, to the bar. The glass bounced and shattered on the wooden floor. He was saying, ‘Jesus Christ, Jesus fucking Christ.’ With one finger, Riley pushed the note towards him, then went and sat down at a small table at the front of the room. He dug in his bag, and pulled out his straw. He played with it between his fingers, and he felt like a twat.
Well done there, Riley. Good work. Just the ticket.

A few minutes later a different man brought over the beer; older, barrel-chested. The landlord, at a guess.

‘Sorry about that,’ he said. ‘Flat feet. Never went. ’Asn’t a clue. Anything I can do for you, sir, just say. Will you be all right with that?’

Riley gave a little twirl of his straw in his fingers, like a sergeant major’s baton in parade.
I’m the fucking Phantom of the Opera. I shouldn’t be allowed out.
I have to speak again. I cannot be out here in the world and not speak.

Riley gestured to the man to sit, and nodded thanks to him, looking him in the eye. This was going to be exhausting. At Sidcup, everyone knew what to do. The routine bore them along. He had been ricocheting between routine and crisis for years. Here, there was neither.