The Heroes' Welcome (14 page)

He was looking narrowly at her.

‘I wonder where you spent the war, doctor. Saving lives under dangerous conditions, no doubt. A shame you weren’t there to save his. Good morning.’

Fury surged in her at the doctor’s disdain, his disrespect for Peter. If Peter were to die now, he would be dying of the wounds. Whatever he died of, whenever he died, if he were to die in fifty years, it would be of wounds. Nothing bigger, greater, worse, than that war would ever happen to any of them. It never could. Peter was wounded and crippled by the war as much as any one-legged man, any shaking neurological case, as much as Riley, or that man she’d seen in the woods that hot afternoon – the patient from the Queen’s, wearing hospital blues and the tin mask which hid his injuries but failed to hide his shamed and lustful look … How dare the French fool disrespect Peter when Peter’s entire manhood had been dismantled and left in that bloody French mud … How dare
anybody
sneer at Peter, mock his body, what he had done, what he had suffered, what he still suffered …

As her fury subsided, she felt the irony. And she let the actual matter in: pregnant.

She shivered.

Thank God, thank God, thank God, that Harlan was not that kind of man; that our friendship has been pure.
It had a sort of passionate moral reluctance, a shared desire to keep it special, to not be sordid.
If he had been a different kind of man, a pusher, a cad, like that one in the pub in Mayfair …
Well, if Harlan had pushed her, or lured her, she would have capitulated. He knew it, and she knew it. And she would now be in a very difficult and horrid position. But he had not pushed her, in any way. He was a kind man, gentle, and aware of her …
of my what? My delicacy? My vulnerability?

He’d said, ‘Everyone gets damaged by war. You don’t have to be in it to be damaged.’

Well. Harlan and all that he might have been will be over now.

Pregnant.

She put her hand on her belly, and leant with the other against a lamppost. Her stomach still seemed hardly curved. All this time! Her monthlies had been irregular since her breakdown. How had she not noticed? Like an uneducated girl, some poor creature who knew no better …

Baby.

Harlan.

Peter.

Tom.

*

Harlan smiled rather bitterly when she told him, in the privacy of her room, that she was going back to England on family business. ‘Well,’ he said. ‘Summer’s lease hath all too short a let. Is this it, then?’

And she had burst into tears.

As good men will, he took her in his arms, he wiped her tears, he held her close. He kissed her, and she couldn’t not respond. But then she stopped and pulled away and said – everything.

Husband living, not dead. Husband’s state of mind and drinking habits since the war. Existence of Tom. Pregnancy, by husband. It was 5.30 in the afternoon when she burst into tears, and 2.30 the next morning when they stopped talking.

Harlan, sitting across from her on an upright little chair, asked a great many questions. Where had Peter served? What rank was he? Had he come home on leave? How had that been? Had he lost men?

‘Yes.’

‘Where?’

‘I’m not sure. The Somme, and at Loos, I think.’

‘How many?’ he asked.

She didn’t know. ‘Quite a few, I think,’ she said. ‘He was on leave afterwards and went back to a different company. There were heavy losses and things were reorganised.’

He was quiet for a while when she told him. Then he said, ‘Do you understand what that means to him?’

She thought before answering. ‘I suppose I don’t,’ she said. ‘Should I?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘You can’t. But you can know that you can’t understand. You can acknowledge that.’

She was sitting on her bed. Beyond him the evening was light and golden through the window, and small sounds filtered up from the gardens outside.

‘Did you lose men?’ she asked.

‘Not on and on for four-and-a-half years,’ he said. ‘And not alongside them in battle, with their blood on my face.’

She opened her eyes wide.

‘That’s what war is, sweetheart,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry to be the one to tell you, but war is your friend’s blood on your face and his dead body in your arms. Your husband probably didn’t want to mention that. You know why men fight wars?’

‘Not really,’ she said.

‘To protect you,’ he said. ‘And did he protect you?’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Of course. We won.’

He let her sit with that thought for a moment.

‘It’s an unfortunate fact,’ he said, ‘that fighting for civilisation can render a man unfit for civilised society.’

She frowned.

His questions started again, and she answered each one carefully but swiftly.

‘Does he talk to you about any of this?’

‘No.’

‘To his friends, his service buddies?’

She thought of Riley. ‘Mm, no.’

‘Does he
have
friends?’

‘Well, no—’

‘Does he see
anybody
?’

‘Hardly
.
’

‘
Talk to
anybody
?’

‘No.’

Her face was growing tighter.

‘Does he sleep?’

‘Yes, a lot – but restlessly.’

‘Does he dream?’

‘I suppose so.’

‘Do you not know?’

‘It’s been a while since we shared a bed.’

A pause.

‘Do you love each other?’

She started crying softly.

‘Did you ever love each other?’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes. Very much.’

He had his hand round the back of his neck, scratching under his collar. He looked up at her sideways.

‘What about your boy?’ he said, and Julia could only shake her head. ‘How’re they together?’ Shook her head.

‘How often do you get letters from him?’ he went on.

‘Ah – I don’t.’

‘Well, how often do you write?’

She said nothing.

‘Oh,’ he said. A silence fell then too. But not a judgemental one.

‘Did he like the slippers?’ he asked, after a pause.

She looked up. ‘How do you know about the slippers?’

‘I was in the shop when you bought them,’ he said. ‘I noticed you.’

She liked that phrase.
I noticed you.
It suggested a cleanness of look, no residue and detritus built up about the image one sees: seeing someone just as they are, now. As themself.

‘At home,’ she said, ‘nobody likes me. I have done an awful lot of silly things. I’ve gone awfully wrong.’

‘You can go right again,’ he said, easily and without thought.

‘Can I? How?’

‘Just start doing the right things,’ he said, and as he said it his face broke a little, as if he realised, in the saying, what that meant, here, and now.

With every question he asked, and every answer she gave, a few scales fell from her eyes and clouds divided. Laid out before another person, someone who knew nothing of her family, the story reappeared before her eyes too, fresh and with perspective. She recalled the flood of anger she had had with the doctor – for judging Peter, for not understanding. As if she had ever understood.

Harlan asked: Had she left home before? No. So what had made her do it this time? It was all too much. Had she thought it through? Lord, no! Did
she
have friends? No. Who did
she
talk to?

After a pause, ‘No one.’

Then, ‘You,’ she said.

He stood, suddenly, and moved across, and kissed her, her face tilted up uncomfortably, his back too bent over for ease. He stopped, touched her cheek, sat down again.

‘What
did
happen to your face?’ he said. The light was beginning to fade behind him now.

‘I was having a kind of breakdown,’ she said. ‘I had the idea that if I could make everything perfect for Peter then he would be happy. Including myself. I wanted to be perfect for him. I had – well, I gave myself – a kind of beauty treatment. Chemical. I thought if I was beautiful enough … anyway, I was wrong, and it went wrong, and so here it is!’ She gave a bold little laugh, and threw her hands up elegantly.

‘When?’

‘Nine months ago.’

‘How do you feel about it now?’

She had to think about that for a moment, perched on the satin eiderdown, like some kind of dolly. Through this examination she was going to learn something. How did she feel?

‘Foolish,’ she said.

‘You know, though, that beauty isn’t your face? It’s part of your entire self? You know different people bring it out in each other?’

‘Yes,’ she said, smiling. ‘That’s a nice way to look at it.’

‘Do you not see that you’re bringing it out in me?’

She looked across at him,
sitting there.
You shot my goblin
,
she was thinking.
For that I will always love you.
At least – she thought she was thinking it but she said it out loud, and he looked back at her and smiled, and closed his eyes. Then he stood, and came and sat beside her, and put his arm around her, close. They sat like that for a moment, before he turned and shifted the pillows from under the bedcover, and lay back, and said to her, ‘Come.’ He pulled her down to him again, putting her head on his chest, and he stroked her hair as he gazed at the ceiling.

‘So,’ he said. ‘How much, exactly, is he drinking? Was he getting in to work OK, or had it gone beyond that?’

‘Do you know about drinking?’ she asked, twisting to look up at him. She could smell his soap and sunshine smell, see the gold glints on his shaven face. A clean man.

He said, ‘My father fought in the Civil War. He came back a drunk. He’d developed a relationship with spiritus frumenti; used to get it from the medical supplies when there was no whisky to be had, and he acquired a taste for it.’

‘What is it?’

‘Grain spirit – medical alcohol,’ he said. ‘It’s not good for a man. He died of it. It took a long time and broke our hearts.’

He put it so simply.

‘But you survived,’ she said.

He said, ‘What’s important is the spirit in which a person lives. Longing for a particular situation which is “happy” is not … real. But if you’re living in a way which leads to the good, then you can die at any point, whether you’re happy that particular day or not.’ Then with some care, he said: ‘Neither you nor I could be happy if we did wrong by your husband.’

Is that true?

‘He’s lost the lives of his men,’ he said. ‘He can’t lose you too.’ And when she protested, ‘But he doesn’t want me!’ Harlan said, ‘Oh yes he does. He wants you and he needs you in ways beyond human comprehension. Certainly beyond his comprehension. And yours.’

There was longer silence after that.

Then he said: ‘Is your husband going to die and break your hearts? Yours and your son’s?’

At which she wept again, furiously, for a long time, her head on his chest, snot and gulping, ugly crying: for everything she’d done and been unable to do, for Peter, for his men, for Tom, for Riley, Nadine, Rose, the man in the tin mask, the unborn child …

And as good men will, he took her in his arms, again, and wiped her face when the time was right, and kissed her. And then, with pauses for tacit permission, he was undressing her, and unwrapping her, and undoing her, and she longed for it and was glad. As he made love to her, from the tentative to the permitted to the suddenly and unexpectedly ferocious, everything that was in her came roaring out: grief and pain and shame and fury and an equally hard and ferocious joy.

Hours later, she lay in the pre-dawn blackness, knowing that this didn’t change anything.

He murmured, ‘Let me at least escort you back to England. I’m doing that at least …’, and she said no. No. She couldn’t bear it.

She did ask him, in the course of it, how he could love her, with her face. He said, ‘You’re tough. You’re fun. You’re not like a European – you’re not obsessed with the past. Even now I don’t feel like your past is reaching out to drag you back …’

She sighed.

‘… I feel like you’re going into your future. Make sure that’s what you do, won’t you? Though it’s not the future I had in mind for us.’

He was forty-two, and the way he looked at her, as dawn came up, was very steady. She gave him the address of the small hotel she used to stay in sometimes in London, and said if, if – but he shook his head. ‘You let me know if he dies,’ he said. ‘US military will have my address.’

*

In the morning the hotel manager came to her room, bustling and outraged, but Julia was already packed and on her way. She took a train to the largest town she could identify on the Côte d’Azur. All she needed was a decent doctor and nobody she knew. She couldn’t go back. She couldn’t stay here. She couldn’t be with Harlan. She couldn’t live without him.

A strange frozen feeling had come over her. She’d heard nothing from Locke Hill – she’d left no address, nobody knew anything of her or she of them. But the house of cards was about to fall in. She could feel the ghost of the air moving as the cards started to shift, the incipient gust of change.

It’s up to me
, she thought.

*

The station at Marseilles smelt of fish. The street outside was full of US sailors on shore leave, and their tough-looking Shore Patrol carrying truncheons. The local people looked evil, poor and miserable. It was neither quiet nor clean. Some small children clustered too close around her, distracting and confusing her, grabbing her coat – begging – or stealing? She moved on to a café, sat, and an African came and spoke to her, kindly, saying: ‘Madame, you should not sit here alone, trouble will come to you.’

She cried for a bit, and several men came and tried to speak to her, none of them kind, and none of them a tall and blue-eyed US lootenant.

She had been a fool, a
fool
, to think she could be free. The only way to be free is to cut out your heart. You cannot live free. You can only live by love. Very well. She would love.

She went to the ticket window.

London, Wigan, Sidcup, July–September 1919

Riley was on a train again, rattling down to Sidcup. Major Gillies wanted a look at him, see how the old jaw was holding up, that sort of thing. Riley was rather afraid that Gillies might want to talk about his state of mind as well, so he felt obliged, while gazing out at the back gardens and the apple orchards, to go over it, so as to have a quick answer to give.