The Heroes' Welcome (10 page)

He was leaning over Bazalgette’s fine stone embankment wall, smoking, a month or so after leaving Locke Hill. His leg ached. It usually did, but he didn’t think about it: background pain seemed right to him, a fair price to pay for the fact that he had been carried back when so many others stayed out there on the wire, in the sinkholes. A sort of tax. Nobody knew it hurt, and to mention it would be to ask for sympathy:
verboten.
Anyway, booze was a marvellous painkiller.

Normally in this position he would
be glancing over at the Albert Bridge on the left and Battersea Bridge on the right, and musing in general terms about which would be the better to jump off so he could just be with them in the halls of death, instead of having them visit every night, but now he was distracted. Out on the river a cormorant was struggling epically with an eel, chucking it and catching it, frisking over the surface of the water, trying to get the slithery length of the creature vertical enough for long enough to swallow it down his oily black gullet –
a sword swallower of a bird
–
astonishing patience …

Tom would like to see it.

Banish that thought.

He was hungover, not drunk, and if not actively pleased to find himself interested in something, aware that he should be.
I wonder if I’m seeing this as a metaphor. What, that I am an eel, thrashing, desperate for my life? No. Though desperate, I am immobile, and my life – my life – there is little in my life to fight for. Nobody needs my life. Oh stop it, you self-pitying ass. I did what I could, and it was not much, and I did it badly, and I could not help, and I should be with the men I helped to kill.

Shut up, Locke. Who cares?

A skiff going by disturbed the cormorant, which dropped its prey and lifted itself, flapping slowly, heavily, from the water.
Everyday life of everyday folk
,
he thought. A woman walked by alone in a light summer coat, a leisurely pace, a hip-swing, and a residual part of him thought,
Whore? –
but he didn’t care. He
really
didn’t care. His sins and their pleasures had long been stale to him.
Anhedonia – no pleasure
. Every human body was a corpse in waiting.

He dropped his cigarette end in the low-tide mud. Thoughts of Julia were coming up, so it was time for a drink. Everyone seemed to think he was allowed to hate her now, as she had bolted – Biarritz, according to the bank, not that she’d let them know – and deserted not only him but their child. But he had no interest in hating her, or blaming her. It was not, any of it, her fault. She had returned to him over and over, asking to be allowed to love him, and he had spurned her. The fact that he couldn’t help it didn’t prevent him from recognising it. And the time when he hadn’t rejected her – physically at least – had turned into an emotional rejection more shameful, more disgusting. When she came in to him and laid her fabulous body alongside his drunken ingratitude, she told him she loved him, she forgave him, and she only wanted what was good for him. And how had he responded to this? The fleshy memory of that poor bloody boy held off just long enough for him to take her, drunk and in tears, in the most insultingly brief and animalish way –
worse even than last time, in 1915
– and then he was swirling again in the mud smell, cordite and blood and sodden uniform, and that boy gasping for help … and forcing himself out of it, three fingers of whisky, and there she is – oh God – more brave smiles through the tears, on that terrifying face, wanting to know if he loves her, and a row, and the decanter.

How do you come back? How?

She no doubt thought that I rejected her because of her face. As if I gave a damn about that. I only wish I could give a damn about anything. I am only the more ashamed …

So he had left Locke Hill in order that she might justifiably leave. It had been a last burst of oddly placed chivalry. And now people blamed her anyway. And were so terribly kind to him.

What do I have to do to be punished as I deserve?

He turned to go back across the road to the pub, to settle for the afternoon and the evening. He didn’t notice the other woman as he crossed the road, who stopped, and waited, and as he stepped up onto the kerb said, ‘Peter?’ and smiled at him.

And – Oh! It was
that
woman. That non-judgemental woman, that sweet-eyed, honey-voiced, quiet, nocturnal woman …
That woman.

‘You look bad, my friend,’ said Mabel, the singer from the Turquoisine, from last year. The American, the black woman, the woman who lived her own life and wanted nothing from anyone. The woman who was alive. She pronounced it
baid.

‘Oh, I feel
terr
ible,’ he said, with a little apologetic smile. He had never seen her in daylight before. How beautiful she was! Glowing …

She was smiling at him.
Non-judgemental.
He wanted to fall into her arms. She was not England. She was not Julia, or his mother, or his child, or Rose, or the men. He had not failed her. She had nothing on him.

‘
You
,
on the other hand, look marvellous,’ he said. ‘Marvellous. Will you have lunch? It’s time, isn’t it? Come! Let’s go to the Savoy—’

A taxi passing – his arm flung out – his pale aquiline face aglow suddenly with a quite enchanting smile. He could feel that it was enchanting.
Enchant her. Be magnificent – not terrible. Magnificent …

He stood tall and elegant as his arm flew into the air, and the cab drew in to them. ‘Come,’ he said, smiling. ‘I promise you’ll be safe.’

She smiled, laughed a little. Her big brown eyes looked actually happy. ‘No such thang as safe,’ she said.

*

In the gents at the Savoy, Peter saw a row of small brushes fixed to the wall above the basins. Two sinks down, a straight-nosed, high-foreheaded man with his right sleeve pinned up, turned on the tap, took the soap, and was musingly brushing the nails of his left and only hand along the bristles, humming quietly to himself. Washing his hand.

I am a worm. I see that chap’s loss and all I can think of is that I have no such loss and yet I am helpless and how can I be so pathetic. My shame overwhelms my pity. I’m obsessed with my own suffering.

Mabel, clean my mind out for me.

*

For ten weeks he visited her, took her out, stayed on her sofa, lay in her bed. She made him wash and put on clean shirts.

Why does she not turn to dead flesh in my arms like every other woman has since Loos?

He didn’t know. And it wasn’t the sort of thing a chap could ask. He recited to her in Greek:

Man of action, no more tears now, calm these tides of sorrow

Well I know what pains you bore on the swarming sea,

what punishment you endured from hostile men on land.

But come now, eat your food, drink your wine

till the same courage fills your breast now as did then

when you first set sail from your native land.

And translated it for her: what Calypso said to Odysseus, what every soldier wants to hear from a woman.

Then she said, one morning: ‘You know, you need to drink your wine a little less, honey. And maybe talk a little more.’

He gave a quiet, bitter snort.

She said: ‘You know it’s true.’

He said: ‘It makes no difference whatsoever, my dear, if it’s true or not.’ Then he unfolded himself, long and angular like a parallel ruler, and said: ‘I’d better go, before
you
start despising me as well,’ to which she replied: ‘It’s your self you want to change, Peter, not your company,’ and he smiled his courteous, tragic smile, and said: ‘I’m not fit for company.’

And anyway, she’s very capable. She’ll be all right. She doesn’t need me. Nobody needs me any more.

If she hadn’t been so very accustomed to broken men and the terrible damage they do to capable women, she would have run after him and sworn to save him, but she was a grown woman and a nightclub singer, so she let him go.

Biarritz, April–August 1919

Julia went to Biarritz. Train and ferry.
France!
she thought, passing through speedily, on the way to Paris:
look, there it is. How flat. How rather dull.
She looked out the left-hand side.
And all that
, she thought,
happened just over there. That’s where my beautiful husband lost … lost his …

Well
.

She turned her back, and looked out to the west instead. The west seemed far more interesting. Or –
more future
. That was the thing! She was so utterly fed up with the past, with waiting for the future to begin, with the exhaustion of trying to maintain perpetual optimism, with waiting for Peter, with being gazed at by Rose. For years, it had all been going to be marvellous, as soon as the war was over.
And look at us now.

How very naive I have been. Or optimistic? Where does one finish and the other begin? I will never know, because now they are both gone gone gone. Poor old me that I was, useless, sad, unreliable … No good to anybody … yes, even you, Tom
…
They will ALL be better off without me – and
I shall become a magnificent cynic, practical and safe. Someone who does no damage. Defended.

She knew that she had done a great deal of damage.
To myself, most of all.
She was terribly sorry, for Peter, for Tom. She had to lift her chin at the thought
of Tom, because a kind of tearfulness was coming into her eyes. Tom didn’t like her. There was no route back to the few days after his birth, before her mother had taken him away, when it had been so sweet and warm and she had felt like a mother, before she started crying all the time … No route back. Tom would be better off without her. She could see no way of making anything better – indeed, her attempts to make things better had caused a lot of the damage in the first place.

Time to leave.

Moving fast, south and west – that felt right. She loved the speed of the train; the chuffing and rattling, the specks in the wind. She stuck her head out of the window for a moment, and wanted to shout out loud. She was Anna Karenina … At Paris she had a few hours before her next train. Waiting seemed impossible. What to do? New perfume! She’d been wearing Malmaison and Nuits de Chine since 1913: another from Rosine? Or – hm. Poiret was too pre-war.
Something new
… she strolled out of the great Gare du Nord – laughing at how it said NORD NORD NORD all over it –
no doubt about where you’re heading, and I’m not! –
and looked around, but even with the spring gleaming around her nothing seemed clean enough. It was all too close to the remains of the war.

Later
,
she thought.
I must, after all, get the right scent for my new life. New stamping grounds, new thoughts, a new way of being. The new persona.

A cab took her down to the Gare d’Orsay, across the river. All the symbolism seemed right to her. South and west. Warm and new.

Her final change was at Bayonne: Westward-ho! The train had double-decker carriages and a tremendously, humorously tall chimney. She went on the upper deck. Anna Karenina had faded away …
Charlie Chaplin?
No. Some fabulous vamp. Theda Bara! No, too tragic – Mabel Normand? Not dignified enough …
For a moment Emma Bovary crossed her mind, but she didn’t let
her
stay long. The rails spoke to her, as rails do:
I tried, I tried, I tried, I tried. And in French – j’ai essayé, j’ai essayé, j’ai essayé, j’ai essayé.

And on through Anglet to Biarritz, where the fresh ocean air threw her backwards, and the stupendous majesty of the Hôtel du Palais, formerly Empress Eugénie’s
pied à mer
, filled her with glee. She took a modest room (she wanted to be here for a while), made no excuses about being alone, and from the array of available restaurants and cafés she selected the white and gold Rotonde, a great semicircle stuck on the western face of the hotel, with a wedding-cake aesthetic and tall windows in all directions. It was slap bang on the edge of the world and at the same time in the middle of everything. She took a table at the apex of the semicircle. To her right, the Lighthouse, on its pile of rocks. To her left, the Rocher de la Vierge
,
with its winding walkways through the crashing surf. Behind her, the town of Biarritz, Aquitaine, the whole of France, the whole of Europe. Before her, the golden beach, the salty bright Atlantic ocean, the west spreading out –
nothing but water between me and New York!
It was terribly exciting. Her stomach was trilling away.

I shall take
tilleul
, linden, for its calming effect.

She felt like a queen.

New York! Well, why not New York? And what would you do in New York? I would work in a handkerchief shop. People would value me for my good manners, alluring demeanour and elegant English accent. I would live in a ladies’ hotel. I would sell my jewellery. Or, I would find a lover – who would lavish me with furs and keep me at the Ritz, a railway tycoon from Pittsburgh, a Russian prince fleeing the revolution, a tall silent horse-riding man who owns half of Texas, a man – a lover …

A rush of blood, her spine shivered and she felt weak with sudden desire. This illicit thought, this thrilling word …

A new man?

Yes! If a man can be found who sees the peculiar allure of my new face, then yes, damn it, why not?

Six weeks now since that last
act of union. It had not been horrible as Tom’s conception had been, three years before, that nightmarish almost-attack. This had been … sadder. She had allowed herself to hope, and he had been incapable of hoping. It had been, really, the moment of proof of the separation between Peter and her. The act of dissolution, confirmed.

And how dissolute he is now. How dissolute we are, the pair of us. Dissolved – from each other, and in ourselves. Nothing to hold on to—