My Dear I Wanted to Tell You (27 page)

He wrote:

If you could direct me to Poolstock Lodge, Poolstock

The landlord, having read the note, put his hand briefly to his mouth, and said: ‘Is it Sybil Ainsworth you’re after, lad?’

Riley nodded.

‘Does she know you’re coming?’

Riley shook his head.

The man was thinking.

‘Were you alongside Jack Ainsworth?’ he asked.

Riley nodded.

After a moment the man said, ‘If you can wait till closing, I’ll take you over myself. Likely she’ll offer you a room there. If she can’t there’s a bed for you here, on the house, as long as you’re staying.’

Riley looked for a moment as if he might demur, but the landlord said gently, ‘Don’t be too proud, lad.’

Riley nodded.

*

Sybil was broad-faced, full-figured, small-waisted, strong. The house was clean and comfortable within its means. The landlord had gone in first.

‘Come in, Captain,’ she said. ‘You’ll take us as you find us. Please sit down.’ She took his greatcoat. The scarf was tucked into his tunic. Two studio photos of Jack stood on the mantelpiece: one in uniform, hat on, standing beside Sybil as she sat, a curtain behind them, formal. The other, clearly taken at the same time, Jack hatless, standing alone, a cloudy backdrop behind him, looking very handsome, and just like himself. His big ears.

He wanted to say, ‘Mrs Ainsworth, your husband . . .’

He took off his hat, sat on the edge of the little armchair she offered him, and pulled out his notebook.

He couldn’t even think what he wanted to say because he had to write it, and it was different: it was formal; it was permanent; it had no tone of voice to carry it over its own inconsistencies; it had . . . He had to learn to talk again. Or to write.
So much to learn.

‘Would a cup of tea be nice?’ she asked. ‘Mr Sutton’s told me about your face – if you want to keep it covered that’s all right with me, but if you’d like tea I can look the other way, or you can do whatever you need to do. I wouldn’t mind the sight of you, if you’re concerned about that. But perhaps when the children come in from school . . .’

There was so much he could say to that. He wrote:

A cup of tea, thank you. I drink through a straw, it’s tidier and not too frightening I don’t think. I’ll be gone before the children come.

‘You will not, if you don’t mind,’ she said. ‘Jack wrote very highly of you, Captain, and the children would like to see you . . .’ She stumbled for a second over ‘see’. ‘They’d like to meet you. Arthur and little Sybil hardly knew their dad. Alice and Annie remember him better. They’d be sad if I let you go.’

She hadn’t sat down. She went next door to make the tea. Riley could hear her moving about. She could have come back into the front room, the company room, but she didn’t.

He went across to the little desk opposite the fireplace, and started to write her a letter.

Dear Mrs Ainsworth,
It’s easier to write to you now, having seen your face. My previous letter written from France was full I know of all the weaknesses that such a letter always must have. I have come now because I want to tell you how Jack died, but more importantly how he lived, and how much he meant to me.

He died bravely – they always say this but it is true. He was blown up by a shell near Hébuterne; well, he was sent flying, and he died of a head wound that day. They were able to bury him in the village cemetery, where in times of peace I am told daisies grow. Prayers were said, and the CO read the prayer of yours that he carried with him always.

He lived, as a soldier, with kindness, odd though that may sound. He was kind. He was older than many of us, and his kindness meant a great deal to a great many of

Riley had to stop a moment, his memory sabotaged.

Sybil came back in, carrying a tin tray, flower-patterned, with two cups of tea. ‘Sugar?’ she said, and he nodded, and handed her the letter he was halfway through.

She read it, and nodded a couple of times, and she folded it and put it in her pocket. As she did so, Riley reached into his inner pocket and took out his Small Book, and from it, her prayer. He passed it to her, and she took it, and read it as if she had never seen it before. She stood a few seconds in silence, holding it. ‘Did he give it you?’ she said, finally.

Riley nodded, and scribbled:

Indirectly. It came on to me in hospital.

‘I wondered what had happened to it,’ she said. Then there was a moment of embarrassed confusion as she tried to give it back to him, and he wanted to say, ‘No, no, it’s yours,’ but she said: ‘He gave it you. It’s yours.’

He put it back in his book, back in his pocket, and he wrote:

Thank you.

And then he wrote,

Mrs Ainsworth, what is good cheer?

She smiled then. ‘Remembering that things will change,’ she said, ‘and maybe for the better.’

He wrote:

Look on the bright side?

She curled her lip. ‘I know,’ she said, ‘some think that sounds like claptrap from a simpleton. And you know what the war’s done to me and my children. But bitterness never helped anyone and that’s God’s truth.’

‘Na,’ he said. The scarf was loose around his face.

‘You, for example,’ she said. ‘Will you talk again?’

He shrugged.

‘Likely you will if you want to,’ she said. ‘Who do you want to talk to? And don’t say Jack.’

He smiled. ‘Ya,’ he said.

‘Me?’ she said. ‘All right.’

She didn’t know it was his first word.

*

Mr Sutton from the Swan joined them for supper, and told stories of Jack’s boyhood, and their times together at the railway coach-builder’s. Sybil gave Riley his food beforehand, on his own, and he thanked her for the courtesy. The children stared. They warmed up after Riley sketched each of them in his notebook, and tore the pictures out to give to them. Young Annie was very like her father.

‘It’s very good,’ she said. ‘It looks just like me.’ She looked at him. ‘But I can’t see what you look like. Why’ve you yer scarf on at supper?’

Sybil didn’t tell her to hush, though Alice did. Riley put his finger up, to ask them to wait a moment, and scribbled her a note. She read it out loud. ‘“I was hurt badly at the battle of Pass-, Passchen-, Passchendaele” – oh, yes, I know that one – “and now my face is very frightening so I cover it up.”’

She stared over at him. ‘Is it really, really frightening?’

He nodded.

‘Is that why you don’t talk?’

He nodded.

‘Have you not got a mouth any more?’

He kind of shrugged.

‘Can I see?’

‘Annie!’ cried Alice. Arthur stared, agog with appalled hope. Sybil was still silent, watching. Mr Sutton said, ‘Oh, dear God, child.’

Annie turned and said, ‘Don’t swear, Uncle.’ Then: ‘
Can
I see?’ she asked again. Her face was kind and curious.

Riley looked at Sybil.

‘It’s up to you,’ she said. ‘You can’t shelter the little ones too much.’

He looked pensively at Annie. Eight years old, her father’s daughter. Then he wrote:

If it gives you nightmares, you can come and kick me in the morning. And remember, I have a very pretty heart.

She read it out, and laughed, and settled down to stare at him. The others were motionless, except for Mr Sutton who started refilling his pipe. Alice looked at the table.

Riley unwrapped his face.

Silence of anticipation.

There.

My half-healed face naked in a room of strangers.

Such handsome eyes
, thought Sybil. The expression in those eyes, the fear, the apologetic concern for the feelings of those looking, the expectation of revulsion, filled her with tenderness towards him. The eyes transfixed her before she saw the rail of scars, the crooked, still swollen jawline, the strange rebuilt mouth.

Poor lad
, thought Mr Sutton.
Dear God, no wonder Bert dropped a glass.

‘Eyurrgh,’ cried Arthur, fascinated, and only six. Alice shushed him, and would not look. Little Sybil’s mouth was wobbling. Riley glanced at her sadly, and Alice smiled at him with a tiny gulp and took her out into the kitchen. They could hear as she started to howl.

‘That is quite scary,’ said Annie, in an observational tone. She squinted at it, and moved round to look at it from the side. ‘I quite like it, though. Can I touch it?’

Riley felt the tightness across his cheekbones again: a little snort of utterly unexpected laughter, trying to find a place to go. He nodded, and watched her until she went out of focus as she came up close and carefully prodded different places on his face.

‘But you have got a mouth,’ she said. ‘I bet you could talk.’

He said, ‘Ad da da.’

She grinned. ‘See?’ she cried. ‘You must take honey and hot water, and whisky, for your throat.’

He reached round her for the notebook. She passed it to him.

He wrote:

The surgeon at the hospital made me a new jawbone out of rubber, and brought the skin from my head to cover it. They are going to get me teeth. They say I might be able to chew and eat again. I think I’ll always be a messy eater, though.

‘Arthur was a messy eater,’ she said kindly. ‘He grew out of it. He practised eating tidily because Mam said to. Did they cut you and stitch you?’

yes

‘Do you remember, Mam, they did that to Jean’s dad after the fire in the engine house?’

Arthur and Mr Sutton were still staring. Sybil said, ‘They did that, Annie.’

‘It’s clever how they can do that,’ Annie said. ‘And it’s not that frightening, you know. I suppose because your eyes are kind.’

His pupils shrank away, tiny, black in the grey fields. He blinked several times. Then he groped for his notebook. Sybil passed it. Riley wrote:

Thank you. What you have said makes me feel much better about my face.

She read it, smiled at him, jumped up and patted his cheek. ‘Best do the dishes now,’ she said.

*

Riley lay flat on his back in Arthur’s little bed, opening and shutting his mouth. Opening and shutting, opening and shutting. He held his nose, and tried to breathe through his mouth. ‘Nga, nga, nga,’ he said. ‘Na da da la la la na na na dee nadee nadine.’

He fell asleep weeping.

Sybil heard him. Lying beside her, so did Alice. Each wished there was some way under God’s sun that she could go next door and comfort him.

Chapter Twenty-Six

London, December 1918

Peter was at the Forty-Four, trying to locate relief in his body. His booth was by the tiny dim dance-floor, lit with the pink twinkling gleam of gas lamps. On his small table were a dark, glowing whisky and an ashtray, semi-full. The club was almost empty except that on the bandstand Mr Sidney Bechet, the new saxophonist from the Southern Syncopated Orchestra, was doing a cocktail-hour turn.

Peter’s long torso was curled around a cigarette, and the line and swirl of the smoke rising from it looked to him like the line and swirl of the saxophone line that encircled him. He felt the smoke inside his lungs, moving and sighing. This was one the joys he was counting in his mind. The feel of the smoke in his lungs. The fact that nobody was going to interrupt this cigarette. The thrill of the vestige of whisky on his lip. The beautiful pure clean liquid-honey sound of this glorious instrument. The smooth dryness of his socks. The soft clean wool of his vest. His face, still fresh from this morning’s excellent shave: hot towels, essence of Jamaican lime, only a small attack of the shakes when the barber opened the cut-throat razor to strop it. He hadn’t drunk very much tonight and he wasn’t going to. Things were pretty good, really. He was doing all right today. When he felt all right enough, he was going to go home to Julia.

The sounds inside his head had been very, very bad but you wouldn’t know it to look at him. A tightness in the hollow under his cheekbone, perhaps. The saxophone was unravelling it.

A woman sidled up to him, sweaty green satin dress, poor choice of lipstick colour.
‘Quelquechose à boire?
’ she said, with a powdery smile. Her eyes were made up huge and round, and looked like pansies.

He shook his head quickly. This was his third whisky. He didn’t want more. More didn’t work any more. No doubt he would try more again, and it wouldn’t work again – but not today. Today had been all right.

‘Quelquechose à boire pour moi?
’ she said, a little louder over the music.

He wondered why she was speaking French to him when she was so clearly, from her atrocious accent, English. The answer came on the heels of the thought –
Oh, God, of course . . . She’s assuming I have acquired a taste for the French, over there.
It seemed to him strangely pathetic: this English whore pretending to be a French
pute . . . As pathetic as the fact that she can’t conceive of any other reason why a man would be in a place like this alone, unless he was looking for one of her type.

Woman, it’s over. It’s changing. Let go, for God’s sake. Go back to a decent life.

But then she probably doesn’t have a decent life to go back to.

He wasn’t going to look up at her. If you look at them they never leave you alone. As if, once you looked up, let alone anything more, they tattooed you with a secret sign, and then they and their sisters knew, they always knew, and they would always find you. Or perhaps they could smell it.

‘No,’ he said. She was spoiling his moment.

Suit yourself
, her shrug said. She perched at the next table and scanned the elegantly seedy room for newcomers. It was too early. She smiled at Peter again, and lowered her eyes. He looked the type to like demure. Nothing else to do, anyway.

Peter rubbed the back of his neck where it was stiff, stretched his arms out. The sound went through him like a filament along the veins, silver. So pure! And yet it knew everything. Mercury. And fire. It could clean you out.

It was the only thing that cut through the still-roaring barrage.

A rather exquisite Chinese man lounged two tables along, wearing a white scarf of the type that used to be called a cataract, held by a diamond pin. He glanced at Peter, offered a little nod suggesting the compliments of the evening, and an exploratory stare. Peter looked away to the bandstand, just as the American girl came on.

Ah, the American girl. Her name was Mabel. When she wasn’t singing she kept the bar at the Turquoisine. Her skin was deep brown and her hair was shining black, plastered to her round head, her eyes were huge and her lashes lay on her cheeks. She was nothing like anything he had known in France and Flanders, and Peter loved her as he loved Mr Sidney Bechet’s saxophone, because she was so utterly new and strange and beautiful. She greeted him with a little wave, and moved on up the stage with a smile for the sax-player. After a few bars, she started to sing: ‘How you gonna keep ’em down on the farm, after they’ve seen Paree?’ Then a song of her own, one of her long slow numbers, ‘I Saw You Yesterday’, her voice as sweet and harsh as the sax was pure.

The Chinese man closed his eyes. The prostitute smiled lazily. Peter lit another cigarette, and felt the barrage subside a fraction, and relief emerged, finally, sending out a few tendrils as the music wrapped and washed and purified each drop of his battered mind.

More people started to arrive. The Original Dixieland Band lot came crowding in, gradually filling the place up, like champagne in a glass, rising, bubbling: a noisy, glittery, laughing splashy mob of officers, swells, the odd dowager, and bobbed-hair upper-class girls, flashing eyes, wet-lipped, short-skirted – the longer the war went on the shorter the skirts became . . .
Lucky for the sake of public decency it’s over.

It’s over.

They were ready to be hysterical, raucous, drunk and lascivious. Peter smiled, and drew himself together against them, their glare, their mania, the great surge of pity that flooded his heart at the sight of them, the shards of hatred for those who had sat out the war . . .
To pity or to hate. What a choice.

Mabel was leaving the stage, going on to her next engagement. Mr Bechet had disappeared, and with him the fire-pure mood. In its place came the new band, in top hats spelling out ‘DIXIE’, clashing saucepan lids, squawking blind gaiety, and fun fun fun. Peter listened to the first two numbers, watched the mad energy and wild dancing they provoked, bare knees swinging, legs flashing, and then he moved out, against the tide. A feather boa snagged on his jacket collar for a moment, purple, light and clinging, and a sharp waft of patchouli, cut with potassium permanganate, caught in his throat. The smell of brothel. The boa’s owner turned and twitched it off him, leaving a little clingy scrap of purple ostrich fluff on his shoulder. She caught his eye, hers heavily lined with black, shining. She didn’t stop talking to man in front of her, but her eyes and her long, painted, chattering smile lingered.

Outside on the street, Peter leaned on the wall for a while, breathing, closing his eyes. He had in his mind – running alongside the barrage, as if the barrage were a soundtrack – images of then and now, then and now. The girl with the boa, before. What had she been? A tart already? Or a farmer’s daughter? A vicar’s daughter? A schoolgirl? A girl in long skirts, a clean face, an early bedtime, an exchange of glances after church and perhaps a walk, if he’d met her father . . .

When did the girls all start wearing cosmetics? On his third leave, Julia had greeted him with blackened lashes and a reddened mouth, like any
pute
in Étaples or Amiens, and she had cried because he had not thought it beautiful, and he had felt himself a boor. Again. He closed his eyes, opened them, and moved on towards Greek Street.

The girl in the green dress followed him.

‘Come on,’ she said. ‘You want to go somewhere? You got nowhere to go . . .’

He looked back at her. ‘Dear girl,’ he said. ‘How about you? Don’t you have somewhere better you could be?’

‘Wherever you want, love,’ she said. ‘I’ll look after you. I can see your wife don’t understand you.’

‘On the contrary,’ said Peter. ‘My wife is perfect.’ He stared at the girl – nothing to lose now. Thin blonde hair, short like they all had it, thin little knees, a yellow tinge to her skin, eyes painted huge. ‘Were you in munitions?’ he asked.

She made a saucy face.

‘Got used to the money?’ he said. ‘Lost your job?’

‘Piss off,’ she said. ‘You don’t look like a do-gooder. I’m all right.’

‘I’m not a do-gooder,’ he said. ‘Far from it.’

‘All the better,’ she said. ‘Come and tell me about it.’

‘No,’ he said. ‘I have an appointment.’

‘Oh, suit yourself,’ she said, bored suddenly, and turned on her narrow silver heel, her little bottom in the green dress twitching.

Guttersnipe princess, he thought. Phew.

Women no longer kept Bloom’s corpse from his arms. Nothing did. There was no point in trying. All that was over. It was over. It was all different now and he was going to be a good man.

Over. The terrifyingly lovely word. Over.

And what now?

The aftermath.

Now there’s an interesting word.

He came to the door of a Georgian house of smoke-blackened brick, and pushed his way up the narrow flights of stairs that led to the one crooked room that was the Turquoisine. A very different crowd: drunks, foreigners of all sorts, some Yanks, black men, only one or two slumming aristocrats, on the arms – or in the arms – of unsuitable lovers.

‘Welcome to the Turquoisine,’ purred Mabel, already on stage, unpinning her hat, smiling a beautiful big broad smile. ‘By my watch,’ and she held up her elegant wrist where a pretty jewelled bracelet watch glittered, ‘it’s December eighteenth, and that, my friends, means happy one month of the Armistice to y’all!’

Peter winced as if he had been slapped.

Today was Julia’s birthday.
Oh damn, oh damn.

Is there no end to the ways I let her down?

He breathed gently. His hands on the edge of the table were quite white.
It’s too late anyway – it makes no difference now.

He pushed himself off his chair, and went to the bar. ‘Could I trouble you for some champagne?’ he said wearily, courteously.

The barmaid – a new girl – blinked at him, like a little cartoon lady. ‘It’s after hours, sir,’ she said sweetly.

‘Then perhaps you would ring up Eustace for me, Mr Eustace Hoey, on Rupert Street, and have him deliver me a bottle. Moët,’ he murmured. ‘The 1909, if he has any left. I may have drunk it all. And a bottle of whisky. That Islay he keeps. To my table – I believe it is table nine. Major Locke. Thank you so much.’ He lurched a tiny bit on his way back to his table. It was as if his body, anticipating drunkenness, launched itself prematurely into the familiarity of the movements, the manners, the quiet danger, the elaborate courtesy.

I don’t deserve to be anything better than a drunk
, he thought.
I deserve all the shit that I cause.