My Dear I Wanted to Tell You (30 page)

As she moved towards the dressing-table, she felt the little click of helplessness in her head – like the one she felt when she walked into a shop, knowing she was going to buy something she didn’t need, following the lines of desire that pulled her immutably along, when no one was watching . . .
no one is watching so I can do this thing I shouldn’t do . . .
As she had known that she shouldn’t steal the bottles in the first place, shouldn’t have bought half the clothes she had bought recently, shouldn’t have carried on with half the things she had had done to her face, shouldn’t have let Rose’s mockery discourage her, shouldn’t have let her mother take Tom away.

She sat at her dressing-table and hated herself.

Her skin looked so dull, even in this light. She stared at herself, trying not to cry, not to make her eyes red.

How could you be so shallow and so wicked?

The loss of her youth, the golden years they should have had that the war had taken from her, the past, no past, no present, what future?

Thirty. Thirty thirty thirty thirty thirty. Horrid word. Between thirsty and dirty and flirty. Thirty.

She knew she should leave the bottles alone.

She knew she had never been going to.

*

Rose and Nadine ate the soup at ten o’clock. Nadine hadn’t eaten since a roll on the train at breakfast. Peter didn’t arrive.

‘He’s very taken with London at the moment,’ Rose said. ‘Very busy. Probably he got the offer of a lift down tomorrow. You can’t always get through on the telephone.’
Who am I protecting?
she thought.
Nadine can read between the lines, anyway.

Nadine noticed, but she didn’t say anything. There had been too much that she couldn’t do anything about. Too much, for too long. She couldn’t think what to say.

So, ‘And how are you, Rose, my dear?’ she said instead – and immediately damned herself for letting that impossible unforgivable question slip out, that tiny little question, the question no decent guest or friend could avoid asking, that simplest, most treacherous little question that leads only into the mire. There was only one honest answer, one she’d had often enough from the Tommies: ‘Not a flippin’ clue, darlin’.’ Or as one sweet boy had said thoughtfully, moments before dying, ‘I don’t know. It’s a very complex question.’

Here, now, to Rose, ‘How’s work?’ had to follow, and that would lead on . . . Well, she might as well say it. It was there, said or not. Her stomach lurched a little.
You can forget, you can think you’ve forgotten, you can stay away, you can blot out, you can drown your mind with things that are far, far more important, but some things do not go away.

Nadine had found it fairly easy to acknowledge that she couldn’t go home because it was not possible to change, at one leap, from being what she had become, in France, to being something she could allow her parents to see. And home was the past: unbearable now. Possibilities. Might have beens.

Be straight, Nadine. Before – before the war, and before Riley’s betrayal, there had been –
God! The significance of it all, so trite!
– notions of innocence and the possibility of happiness and . . . Before the war was Riley. But it was all Riley. Riley was everywhere. Before the war, during the war, in France, in the field hospitals, in the stations, in the letters, in the absence of letters, in the shouts of the men, in the mist, in the angle of the kitbag on the shoulder of the stranger on the street, in London, in Paris, in the park, in the
estaminets
, in the Lyons tea rooms, in the mud, in every bloodstained bandage, on the trains, on the road, in the dark, in her dreams, in the night, in the dawn. And here . . . yes, Riley was here. Of
course
Riley was here.

Wherever he might actually be, in reality.

‘Busy,’ said Rose, a little briskly. ‘A constant supply still, as they’re starting to get people back over here. It may be
over
but . . .’

Nadine gave a pale smile. She knew about that. So many men, wounded or not, alive or not, who would not be home for Christmas. Such an echo of 1914, that phrase. She wasn’t going to ask. ‘So tired,’ she murmured instead.

‘Of course,’ said Rose.

‘Think I’ll turn in. Such luxury! Clean bed!’

‘Your hair’s still damp,’ said Rose. It didn’t matter. ‘Well, I’ll see you in the morning.’

‘See you in the morning,’ said Nadine. ‘Happy Christmas!’

*

In bed she lay and thought of Riley’s face and Riley’s arms and Riley’s warmth and every part of Riley, and she cried herself to sleep.

Rose sat by the fire, and blinked slowly, in time with her breath. In, shut; out, open.

*

Rose’s muscles were strung too tight and sharp for sleep. Four females and a child under one roof. Herself, sleepless. Nadine, as mad and taut with unspoken distress as any wounded soldier. Julia, who had been so odd for so long, impossible, moody, self-blaming and miserable. Mrs Joyce, so calm, so unchanging throughout everything that Rose could only assume she was half-witted. And Tom, the silent, obedient, big-eyed child, two years old now, whom Rose for one had never seen do anything but stare, as if in bemused horror –
which might make him the sanest of the lot of us
. She thought about the stocking Julia had done for him: a chocolate coin, a silver sixpence, a little piggybank to put it in, a twirly red and white sugar cane. Daft, for a child so small. But sweet. A sweet, good, generous thing. It will take time; it will all take time. Mrs Joyce was so happy to have him here . . . God, this house needed family in it again, needed everything to pull back together. Needed peace for the damage to settle, and to heal, and to pass. Needed sleep. Needed the men back – the man. They only had the one between them all.

It seemed to Rose that she had been good for a long, long time. Could she go off duty now? Could she have a breakdown? Get drunk? Sleep? Disappear? Be carried away, elsewhere, to safety, to where she was no longer expected to carry anyone else? Anaesthesia, a hospital bed, the swift release of responsibility to somebody else, or to nobody, just not on her?

She’d carried them all in her time.

A breakdown, perhaps? A nervous collapse? That would be nice.

She was not aware that the storm had died down until she heard the sound of the engine outside. Her brain cried,
Emergency!
and she was standing in the silent midnight hall, her heart a-batter, before she was even fully awake. The floor was cold beneath her feet, and the night shadows strange. From the drawing room she heard the little shifts of the embers of the dying fire.

Through the glass panels of the front door the car was sleek and dark. The rain had stopped and the moon raced on high in the wind that had blown the storm away. Black twigs and branches were silhouetted around the drive. Rose could see it all clearly but found that she did not know what to do.

She saw three figures. One was drooping, a limp doll figure – injured?

Was this tableau outside something to be admitted to the house? Or something to hide from? Her judgement had fled; her decisiveness bolted.

The doll was tall, swooping, stumbling. Drunk.

Peter.

The front door was locked. Of course, she had locked it. Where were the keys? Where had she put them? She didn’t know where she had put them. The tableau was unfolding. She couldn’t open the door to it. She felt very strongly that if she let the men in, chaos would come too, and either the house would subsume it, or it would subsume the house. But there was chaos already within. Decorous repressed chaos for ladies. This was male chaos.

Of course – there they were, tucked up on the little shelf by the grandfather clock. Same as always. Open the door. She struggled with it, pulling, rattling. It came open.

Two men were half carrying Peter, his arms around their necks, lolling like Christ crucified, or a wounded man coming in. One of them was Riley, and her heart was glad.

‘Is he all right?’ she said. Another figure appeared – Harker, in his nightshirt, down from his room over the garage, with a blunderbuss. Rose was disconcerted by all the sudden masculinity in the house.

‘He hit his head,’ said Riley. ‘When I knocked him down.’

She looked at Peter’s eyes, and took his pulse. He didn’t look entirely all right. Even for a falling-down drunk. ‘Bring him,’ said Rose, and they followed her through into the kitchen.

‘Ring for Dr Tayle, Harker,’ she said. Better safe than sorry.

Peter removed himself suddenly from one of his supports, and hung in the kitchen doorway, head slung forward, swaying on elastic arms.

She put on the kettle. ‘Keep him upright,’ she said unsteadily. ‘Riley, can you walk him round?’ She didn’t move. Riley went over, saying ‘Come on, sir,’ but Peter launched himself on to a chair. The cabbie looked embarrassed.

Peter wouldn’t stand up, so Riley made the tea, and Rose said to him, ‘You might as well unwrap,’ and then she started crying.

Riley unwrapped his scarf, took his straw from his pocket, and stirred his tea with it.

Rose wiped her nose, poured the rest of the hot water into a basin and started carefully to part Peter’s hair, looking for damage.

She found it. It wasn’t bad. She washed it. She dressed it. Smell of Lysol. Smell of fresh blood.

Riley swallowed.
I can swallow
, he thought.

Peter was staring at him.

Oh, yes. He hasn’t seen the full glory of the face before. Time to make it all right for the person looking at me.

He said: ‘Ello, Beter.’

‘Hello, Riley,’ said Peter, puzzled.

‘Hello, Peter,’ said Rose, and Peter said: ‘Oh, Jesus, Rose.’

‘How many fingers am I holding up?’ she said.

‘Seven,’ he said, as if it were a joke.

Their expressions evidently still meant something to him. ‘Oh. Awfully sorry. Four.’

After a while Rose and Riley steered Peter into the study, and made him flop on the divan there. She couldn’t welcome him or comfort him. There was nothing to give. Running on empty. No patience, no tolerance, no sympathy, no strength – no love no words no time no breath almost. All she could say was ‘Go to sleep’. She sat on the side of the divan, her hand on his arm. She sat for quite a long time.

*

The cabbie said, ‘I’ll be off then, I suppose.’

Riley would have said,
Stay a little, have a rest, before you start back.
He would have said,
Thank you.

He shook the man’s hand, and nodded, and the cabbie went out, alone.

Riley sat at the table and thought:
We have been outside humanity, beyond the moral universe, where there is no reason and no ground beneath your feet. We have been in a parallel reality. We’re going to have to come back.

He wrote it down:

Talk about it. I want to talk about it. I can’t. I wish I could. I’ve seen the shock cases who can’t talk because their brain won’t let them, because of their shock, and I’ve seen the unwounded blokes who can’t because talking about it makes it real and speaking about the unspeakable makes it as if it weren’t unspeakable at all. Although it is. It’s a paradox. I want to talk to someone. I’ll talk to any of you here – Rose? Peter?

Talking is what you do with who you trust.

Talking is human.

Humans talk to each other.

The truth, the whole truth, nothing but the truth

You can all talk please talk

please trust

please love

I want to feel at home in the world again

We thought our lives were ours

and they have not been after all

isn’t this true? Can we all admit it?

He folded the piece of paper and put it in his pocket and felt suddenly very, very tired. He sat, rolled a cigarette. He stood, walked up and down. He filled the kettle again. He looked out into the hall. When he saw the shape of the doctor at the door, he withdrew into what turned out to be the drawing room. Leave them to it. Nothing he could do anyway.

*

When Dr Tayle let himself in, summoned by Harker and forgotten by Rose, he found no one but a very small boy in flannel pyjamas, staring, and asking was he Father Christmas? He said, no, he was afraid he wasn’t, and then Miss Rose Locke hurtled down the staircase into the hall, pale as anything, saying, through a throat constricted with fear, ‘Don’t worry about him for the moment, doctor, you’d better come upstairs. Tom, go back to bed.’

He heard the low moans coming from the master bedroom.

‘I just looked in,’ Rose said blankly. ‘I’d been sitting with Peter. I heard a noise.’

Julia was on the floor in the dim orange light, collapsed, in a silken kimono strewn with vomit. A kind of turban wrapped her head, and her chest was heaving and fluttering.