The Heroes' Welcome (8 page)

In the cafés, at first, she ordered for him. She explained exactly what she wanted: the
bouillabaisse
, strained, with extra cream; the
boeuf stroganoff
very tender, the chicken broth and the
oeuf en cocotte
,
crème de
this and
soufflé de
that. Her concern was visible, she knew: maddening to him and miraculous simultaneously. He let her order. But he would not let her shave him. ‘I’m not going to be a baby to you,’ he warned, and she said, ‘Fat chance,’ which she knew made him feel safer –
but was that part of it? Is wanting him to feel safe another level of nurseyness and mothering?
Early on, she watched him standing shirtless by the china bowl in the barely furnished room, going carefully around his scars, trying to do the folds under his chin where he could not see, nor properly feel. She could see him seeing her in the mirror sitting on her hands on the bed, wanting to help. The only time he let her, despite her tenderness she hurt him, and he flinched, and she could see that he could see that she found it hard not to weep, and he was sorry, and she was sorry, and after that she left the room while he tended himself.
He’s a miracle
, she thought.
So many things he could have died of. Flaps of skin from his scalp down under his chin, his manufactured chin. He’s Frankenstein’s not-monster.
Sometimes she found herself shaking at the thought of what he had been through.

He grew brown in the sun. The waxen scalp skin on his jaw took it differently to the rest of his face, but even so he did not want to grow a beard. He paddled the calanque, and day by day she saw his youth and physical strength starting to flood through his body, healing him and fixing him. It transfixed her. She sketched him each day, to map the transformation as it happened, but her sketches were not good enough and she wished she could photograph him. On the third night, she was watching him sleep, wanting to look more closely at him than his manner when awake would allow, to unveil him. Moonlight was falling on his face, on the strangeness of his reconstructed mouth with its slight downward drag at the right-hand corner and the odd lift at the left, a sort of ugly Harlequin half-smile. She wondered if she feared it, if she wanted to look inside, and didn’t dare. She never, ever wanted to offend him or upset him. He stirred and half woke,
under the strength of my stare
,
she thought, and he hoicked himself up and looked at her.

‘My dear,’ he said, and then thought for a while, and said something more – but his mouth was always clumsier after sleep, and also the moonlight was off his face now, and she could not see him to understand him. It had been interesting, academically, to learn that she needed to read his face, but it was not easy, not helpful to the confidences of the pillow and the encouraging sympathies of the dark. She shook her head, and didn’t want to say, ‘I can’t understand you,’ and terribly wanted to kiss him, because that would tell him …

Does it show, that I want to kiss him?

He smiled at her, and for a moment she thought – but then he scruffled her wild hair, and pulled her down to him, in a friendly way, an innocent way, which made it perfectly clear.

She smiled bravely in the dark.
Is this it?

The trouble is, the subject only arises – think of the vulgar joke he’d make about that! – in the dark, and in the dark is just where we can’t talk about it. Even if we could. Even if talking about it was what we needed to do. Which …

You must accept it. In sickness and in health. This is what you signed up for.

But we have never had any health
,
a wailing voice inside cried out, and a clammy feeling settled over her
– this is what you signed up for …

But we’re young!

*

Dear God
, he’d thought.
She doesn’t know what she’s doing. How close that was!
Even as he’d tried to stop that gaze, to stop her looking at him like that … wanting her so much, wanting to make clear that she didn’t have to worry about that from him, that he would never …

Oh, fuck.

*

By the second week Riley suggested they hungered for culture. Nadine was quick to agree, and they went back to Paris, where it was she who went to every gallery and every great building, and sought out the collections which had been put away for safety, and found the man who had the key to the closed corridor or the right to let her behind the scaffolding of the restorations. Nadine it was who stared at the light over the Seine for an hour at a time, smiling at the gold and grey.

Riley, meanwhile, read French newspapers, observed French life, watched the French responding to peace, listened to French conversations, and made Nadine talk French to him. Despite the pronunciation problems, he was rather quick to learn. ‘
J’aime parler français,
’ he said. ‘
C’est nouveau pour ma bouche. Les mouvements sont bon
– exercise.
Comment on le dit?
Exercise?
Pour le
rehabilitation.’ She was proud of him. It was exhausting being with him, watching his determination.

One hot afternoon, they walked together to the elegant little street behind the Place des Vosges where Nadine’s mother’s family had lived. Nadine had been here a year before, in 1918, when she had been mad with grief and exhaustion.

‘I don’t even know where my grandparents are buried,’ she said. ‘Any of these men in hats could be my relatives, and I wouldn’t know! I thought Jewish families were meant to keep close.’ She told him the story Jacqueline had told her, of the Pereire brothers who had built the railways and financed Haussman in building the boulevards, and how one of them had married the other’s daughter. At the age of sixteen Mademoiselle Pereire had become Madame Pereire, her uncle’s wife, and later there was a rose named after her.

They stood outside number seventeen and admired its red bricks and decent windows. They were good houses, prosperous and elegant.

‘I don’t know why it isn’t my mother’s still,’ she said.

‘Will you knock, and ask?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘I’ll ask my mother, when we get home. It’s interesting.’

Interesting!
She heard herself say it, and she wanted to scream.
Yes, it’s interesting. But. Family history is not a proper occupation on a honeymoon. I am on honeymoon in the city of lovers and I am not an old-fashioned girl. I know what I am missing …

It seemed to her that the balance of blessing and curse on a marriage was a strange and arbitrary thing. Here they were, together, alive, healthy –
because damage is not illness
. Sane, of good sense and rational optimism. Each in love with the other. And yet.

She knew that Europe – the world – was littered with widows – and widowers too – with shell-shocked husbands and victims of this terrible flu, with the syphilitic and those still croaking for air long after being gassed – and with couples lost to each other, or scared of each other, or who hated each other. She thought of Peter and Julia, of Sybil Ainsworth, widow to Riley’s friend Jack, with her four children up in Wigan, of Rose and the thousands of women who would never now know the joys and perils of matrimony at all – though to be honest, Rose didn’t seem to mind as some women did …
oh aren’t Riley and I better off than so many?

Yes, yes of course.

And yet here I am on honeymoon in the city of lovers, where couples kiss on the street, and despite all the blessings of my marriage I cannot be kissed.

*

Riley applied himself most thoroughly. To rowing, to admiring turtles, to improving his shaving technique, to French verbs, to newspapers, to ideas about his future, to planning who he would approach about jobs when they got home, to the names of the stars and of the streets of Paris, and most of all to not looking at Nadine too often or for too long, not catching her eye, not brushing against her.

Is this why men drink?
he wondered.
Is this what sends them to brothels?

But I don’t want to drink, and I don’t want any other girl …

Locke Hill, April–May 1919

One night Julia, drunk on desperation, the shiftiness of spring, and the scent of magnolias on the breeze, fuelled by a faith in masculine desire and the disinhibition of her husband’s perpetual inebriation, made a final, very direct attempt at reconciliation. In a way, when she entangled her negligéed body with his semi-comatose drunken one on his study couch, ignoring his whisky breath, rubbing her breasts on his stubbly face, unlatching the trousers he hadn’t changed for days, murmuring, still, of love, she succeeded. Sex, of an instinctive, semi-conscious kind, was achieved, and affection was there, a sort of bewildered, ancient warmth. At the end she gazed hopefully. She was embarrassed by how inappropriate her radiance might be. And yet again, despite the fact that he was incapable of any such thing, physically, mentally, or emotionally, she allotted to him the stroke of authority and the right to decide about their marriage, their future and their love.

He did weep, which was promising. She wept too. But he had no answer for her increasingly desperate pleas for reassurance, or a declaration about the future, or something.

‘I don’t know,’ he said, over and over. And finally: ‘Stop asking me.’

She went back up to her bed. It was not mentioned afterwards, and their eyes did not meet.

*

Soon after, early one morning, Peter left. He didn’t tell his wife he was going, and Rose only found out because Mrs Joyce heard Max barking at the station taxi as it went down the drive.

‘But where’s he gone?’ asked Rose, who was about to leave for the hospital.

‘I don’t know,’ said Mrs Joyce, bewildered. ‘Millie was about to bring him his breakfast.’

They just stood by the front door, honeysuckle dangling about them from the porch, the sky clear and blue and beautiful above them.

Upstairs, a window was thrown up.

‘What’s going on?’ cried Julia, her voice carrying down.

Rose and Mrs Joyce glanced at each other. ‘I’ll go up,’ Rose said.

‘What on
earth
is going on?’ Julia called again, and somewhere inside the house Tom’s young voice called out, ‘What on
earth
is going on?’ (At this Rose felt her heart slip down sideways, and thought:
I should have made him go to Switzerland, I should have made Dr Tayle send her on a rest cure. Mrs Joyce and I are the only sane people here. I should have sent them off, anywhere with blankets over their laps, on deckchairs. Beef tea. Chicken broth.
)

Upstairs, Julia felt strange to be standing up.

‘Has he gone?’ she said. ‘Has he left?’

‘Well, he’s gone somewhere,’ Rose replied. ‘I—’

‘Good,’ said Julia.

‘Oh Julia—’ Rose blurted, and Julia said, quite politely, ‘Don’t you hate it Rose, when someone says, “You don’t mean that,” as if they knew better than you what you mean?’

‘Yes, I do,’ said Rose, honestly.

Silence.

‘But Julia, why …?’ Rose blurted, and Julia snapped: ‘I have no idea, Rose. Who ever has any idea why Peter does or doesn’t do anything? He doesn’t know himself. And even if he did, I’d be the last person he’d tell.’ They stared at each other for a moment and then Julia said ‘Sorry,’ rather abruptly. She stood on the landing, like a lost lighthouse, her silky dressing gown pooling round her feet. ‘I’m trying to hate him,’ she said. ‘Obviously it’s difficult, but loving him has done us no good at all and I can’t think of anything else.’ She stared around her. ‘And of course it’s rather undignified, you know, when one has made promises and – one’s married – and so forth. It seems I’m letting the side down again after all.’

Rose’s eyes were full of understanding – of how Julia was by nature loving, and her love had at some stage been true and natural; of how she had loved Peter so very conciously, so much and in the face of so much provocation, during the war, that stopping now must involve a considerable wound to her dignity and the investment she had made. Her expression filled Julia with fury.

‘Don’t gaze at me,’ she snapped. ‘You look like some kind of large mammal.’

Rose blinked.

*

Tom was squatting quietly behind the drawing-room door.

*

The next day Julia was sitting on the white iron chair on the lawn, not saying anything to Tom, who was throwing stones at the walls, the cows across the ha-ha, and finally at his mother’s feet.

Rose came across, looking important. Julia glanced up. ‘Gosh,’ she said. ‘You’ve something to say, haven’t you? Tommy, stop that. Is it news from my errant husband?’

‘In a way,’ said Rose. ‘Blakeman rang up.’ Blakeman was Peter’s mother’s butler,
currently
in situ
at Chester Square.

‘Blakeman! We’re honoured. No word from Peter himself, then?’

Tom wandered over and stood by them, dropping stones one by one on to his own feet.

‘He’s staying at Chester Square,’ Rose said.

‘And is he all right?’

‘Apparently.’

Relief and disappointment curdled in Julia’s breast. Relief that he was all right, disappointment that he had no good reason for his neglect. If he’d been murdered, he’d have an excuse.

‘No message from him?’ she asked.

‘Apparently not,’ said Rose.

Tom was picking up the pebbles again, and suddenly threw them up into the air, like a cloud of midges, and ran into the middle of them.

‘Stop that!’ Julia shouted, and Tom ran away across the lawn, not even turning to look at her. The last stones fell behind him. Julia made a face, and turned back to Rose.

‘No … news of his plans?’ she said.

‘No,’ said Rose.

Relief and disappointment retreated; fury and pity battled for a moment. Fury won.

‘How charming of him,’ Julia said. ‘Ask Millie to come and help me pack, would you?’

‘Where are you going?’ Rose said, alarmed.

‘Elsewhere,’ Julia said. ‘Else. Where.’ She flashed her eyes at Rose, and stood up.

‘Oh,’ said Rose. ‘What about Tom?’