The Heroes' Welcome (30 page)

It had occurred to him, when he was so small, that this might be where his mother had gone, and that he’d probably better not mention that. But he’d known that really mothers who have died don’t go in planes, and he’d known even then that there was no point in asking his father. He had looked for the skeletons for years. He never took Kitty with him. He didn’t want her to find them – to be scared, or – worse – to succeed where he’d failed.

But now she was big enough, and she could see his plane. Though the gigantic, delicate wings had fallen away, and anything removable had been taken by older trophy-hunters than he, the body of the plane lay there, an iron ghost, hollow and receptive to his purposes, demonstrative of his superiority, and of his generosity in bestowing this honour. He had something important to say to her. He was telling her, because she had a right to know, that he would not be visiting that man again, and that he expected her not to either.

‘Which man?’ Kitty asked, frowning, because she knew.

‘Father.’

Kitty raised her eyes to him and her mouth went firm.

‘I’m deadly serious,’ Tom said. ‘And if you’re not with me, I shan’t speak to you again.’

She knew he was capable of it.

‘It’s all right for you,’ Tom said. ‘You’re a girl. You aren’t meant to grow up to be like him. I don’t want him, and he doesn’t want me. I’m having Riley for my father and Nadine for my mother. I’ve told Riley. He said it’s quite all right.’

This was a lie. Riley had not said that. But if Kitty believed that Riley said it was all right, then it would be all right. Tom stared down at her, willing her.

‘I think you should do the same,’ he said.

She was picking at a tiny fresh larch cone, pale green, soft and sweet.

‘Where will we go, then?’ she said.

‘I’ve thought of that,’ said Tom. ‘Italy. Nadine wants to go there to see the man that writes her letters. We can make them take us there. Italy is probably marvellous.’

Kitty shrugged, and threw her cone out into the woods. She didn’t know what Italy was. She said, ‘Well, you know I want to go to Italy, but Daddy is still my father.’

He looked at her bleakly. ‘I suppose that is your choice,’ he said. ‘But I pity you.’

‘I don’t care,’ she said. ‘Riley is nice to everyone. I’m the only person Daddy is at all nice to.’

‘So what?’ snapped Tom. ‘Riley’s a good man and Peter’s … an oaf.’ He could see that his calling him ‘Peter’ upset Kitty, but he liked the distance and maturity it suggested. It was even better than ‘Father’.

Once he had seen that he could hurt her, he didn’t actually want to.

‘Where would you go if you could go anywhere?’ he asked her, magnanimously.

Because she was in her own trance, gazing out over blue imaginary skies of her own, Kitty said, without thinking: ‘To find Mummy.’

‘She’s dead.’ Tom said.

‘Dead people have graves,’ Kitty reposted.

‘She was cremated,’ said Tom.

Kitty didn’t know what that meant and wasn’t going to ask.

‘Are you thinking about going to heaven in this plane to find her?’ he said.

She denied it.

‘You want to forget about her,’ he said. ‘She wasn’t nice anyway.’

Kitty objected.

‘She gave me away to Grandma when I was a baby,’ he continued. ‘And she did something mad to her face. I saw it. Her face couldn’t move.’

‘Stop it.’ said Kitty.

‘She would have given you away too!’

‘No she wouldn’t.’

‘Daddy used to hide in his study so he didn’t have to look at her.’

‘That’s not true.’

‘It is true. That’s why he drinks whiskey and needs to go quiet. Ask him. Ask Nadine. Ask Riley!’

As if either of them would ask Riley about a face!

‘She didn’t like her terrible face so she died,’ he said.

Kitty could see the logic of that. Then she thought – ‘But Riley has a terrible face and he didn’t die!’

‘Riley is different,’ said Tom. ‘One, he’s a man. Two, he’s a soldier. Three, he’s a hero. Riley is a superior character.’

And Kitty couldn’t fault him on Riley. Neither of these children had any idea that anybody had ever doubted him. They saw only what Riley was now: a heroic man, a reliable man, a successful and beloved man. That Riley was scarred and damaged and from a poor background merely added to his magnificence: look what he had overcome! Even as a small boy riding on Riley’s broad shoulders Tom had felt the strength of him, and when he slid his fingers in among the black curls under Riley’s hat, and felt the strange roughness of the bare patches concealed there, he was not alarmed or repulsed. Riley published books by famous people, like Mr and Mrs Horrabin, Mr and Mrs Cole, and Mr Wells. When they came to dinner, talk was of policy and ideals, freedom and peace and education. Tom wasn’t very interested, but he was proud. Whereas his actual father. Well.

*

Since Julia’s death, Peter had hardly gone to London at all. Around 1923 he had moved into a slightly damp gamekeeper’s cottage beyond the woods, where there was a small bit of garden, and no immediate neighbours. Riley’s initial suspicion – that the cottage was a place for Peter to get as drunk as he needed without any interference – hadn’t proved to be the case. Around the same time Peter had quietly, of his own accord, stopped drinking, as he had stopped doing almost anything else. Sober, Peter was no more sociable. He had nothing to say, and didn’t listen. He didn’t want to go for a walk, or to listen to music, or to see the children. Gifts of books lay unopened, food stood uneaten, messages unanswered. As Peter’s responses shrivelled, so did Riley’s visits. Though always regular, they became short, safe, and practical: this needs a signature; about Mrs Joyce’s retirement pension arrangements; Tom must go to school/has measles/wants to take up shooting, did Peter have an opinion?

No.

Even this kind of topic, over the years, had shrunk away.

Still, though, Nadine or Rose would periodically throw up their hands and want things to be different – let’s take him for another round of doctors, perhaps they have discovered some new disease, some new test cure – vegetarianism, mentalism, psychotherapy. But Riley, Rose and Nadine all knew the horrible truth that you cannot give your life to trying to help someone who cannot help himself: whatever your effort, it won’t work. So they would remind each other that things could be much worse. Peter is a bucket with a hole in it: don’t keep pouring stuff in – love, hope, attention – because it will just pour straight out again. Or, Peter is a sleeping dog; let him lie.

Kitty did not know this and it could not be explained to her. She was old enough now to go about on her own, and recently Riley had seen her wandering down in the general direction of the cottage, clutching a careful bunch of bright, shiny, sticky-looking buttercups, holding them out in front of her.
We all have the right to our own mistakes
, Riley thought,
even seven-year-olds, and how else do they learn? And perhaps I am wrong, and she will redeem him, or at least awaken him, in some way, like little Annie Ainsworth did me …
talking of which, he needed to send her a shilling for her birthday.

But he was wary.

Well, they were going to be here most of the summer: rebellious Tom, sweet Kitty, and the realistic adults.

In view of the refusal and the buttercups, Riley thought that perhaps it was time once again to disturb the bond of silence into which he and his friend had fallen.

*

The room was the same as it had been since 1923, tidy and spare: a chair, a desk, a clock. On the mantelpiece, incongruous in a glass milk bottle, was the lanky bunch of buttercups. Riley saw how it would have been: Peter having no vase, Kitty embarrassed for him, and for herself for not having realised that he wouldn’t, and determinedly putting it right by finding the milk bottle and making that the vase.

Peter moved very slowly, and smelt of bachelor and seclusion, of tweeds and tobacco. He made courteous moves, offering tea and a seat to his guest.

So. Riley felt a twist of nerves in his solar plexus as he spoke. ‘I can’t help wondering,’ he said, ‘if you’re going to come out of this. Ever.’

Peter smiled into his tea at Riley’s question. ‘So,’ he said. ‘No small talk.’

‘No,’ said Riley.

‘I thought I might,’ Peter said. ‘After ten years. That’s how long it took Odysseus, you remember – but that was one year for each year of his war, which for me meant I should have been through it by 1922 – and the thought didn’t occur to me till 1925. So the equation was wrong.’

‘Do you still think about it?’

‘Oh no,’ said Peter. ‘Hardly at all.’ (This was not exactly true. Instead of sleeping, he spent many of his nights in the same waking dream about it all: a long complex dream involving fuel lines breaking off and flailing in the wind, himself being dragged behind something, with something important he had to do and no way off what was dragging him; Bloom’s head on his shoulder; mud eating at his legs, the smells of cordite and patchouli, mixed – everything was mixed up – a feather boa on a German boy, Julia eating bacon and eggs in the waiting room of the clap clinic in Amiens, looking up and smiling at him, sweetly. The stretcher bearer with the eyebrows. And summer rain, endless summer rain, which turned into blood. Often he felt as if he was still in it, waiting for the arrival of men or of orders, behind the lines in some little village somewhere, in some Flemish parlour. And often the worst dream: somebody’s weight beside him.)

‘You could come out,’ Riley said. ‘The children would like it.’

A long pause.

Riley sat. For a long time.

Well, I’ve done nothing for him for years
,
he thought.
I might as well do nothing for him here in his company.
Peter’s legs were so thin now they seemed to fold up from the old armchair like a cricket’s, and his shoulders were beginning to curve over. Everything about him was folding in. His fading hair, Riley noticed, was receding, leaving the start of a widow’s peak.

He started to think that Peter was not going to respond at all, ever; and he began to wonder how long they would sit, and how either of them could ever break the silence, if they were ever to go back to life and reality …

‘Do you remember being a child?’ Peter asked suddenly. ‘Twelve or thirteen? And looking at the world for the first time and seeing – poverty, and sickness, and hunger, and war, and crime for the first time, with your young eyes, and realising the adults must all be mad? Barking mad, to let the world go on this way?’

Riley did remember. He’d been a bit younger than twelve or thirteen.

‘Then as you get older, your eyes close again. It’s all there, and you know that, but everybody seems to accept it, so you accept it too, and you become inured … Well. I have not found that happy ability to close my eyes to the real nature of humanity. I can’t forget.’ He said it apologetically.

An intense weariness rose in Riley. He had, himself, done very well with the forgetting. There’d been no more risk. His mind was steady. He knew what he had to lose. Whether he had done well enough to feel safe to enter into this territory with Peter, he wasn’t sure. The alternative was to say something facile and practical. Facile and practical, he felt, would be better, as he was going back to spend the rest of the afternoon playing cricket with the children. In fact, he had decided in favour of facile and practical years earlier, and stuck. If that made him, in Peter’s terms, a barking mad adult and part of the wilful blindness, so be it.
The children do not need our grief inflicted on them. They’ll find their own soon enough. As Tom already has. Having been born in it.

‘Life goes on,’ Riley said.

‘How can life go on when death exists?’ Peter said. ‘That’s icing on a poisoned cake. I can’t make that leap into disbelief. That’s why I have made my life very small. It’s – easier to control. I am easier to control.’

‘Why do you need to be controlled?’ Riley asked, though he was beginning to feel a little sick.

‘Because inside I am mad with grief and loss,’ Peter said, mildly. ‘I lost my men. I have lost my peace of mind, my sleep, my manners, my – equanimity. My dignity. My wife! My children. My girlfriend, whose existence is unknown even to you. You. My ability to get anything back.’

‘You
can
have them back,’ Riley said.

‘Really?’ said Peter. A pause.

‘Some,’ Riley said. ‘I’m here, old man.’

There was a silence.

‘It’s getting late,’ Peter said. It wasn’t.

‘Your children,’ Riley said. ‘They’re up at the house. They always want to see you.’ That wasn’t quite true.

Peter shook his head. ‘And my wife …’ he said.

‘Have you ever thought,’ Riley said gently, ‘of finding someone new?’

‘I married her,’ said Peter. ‘I gave my word … I made those promises. And I love her.’

‘But, Peter, she’s dead. Seven years—’

‘I don’t seem to get things like that quite right in my mind,’ Peter said. ‘I let her down …’

To Riley, love was present, current, and vital. It was Nadine looking up and smiling when he came into the room, or having mended his jacket before he realised there was a hole; Kitty hugging him when he picked her up after she fell over; Tom talking to him this morning. It’s a circulation of giving and receiving, a fuel, it fuels itself. Your twisting eyebeams create it when you make love; your words and kindnesses create it, and a child brings an entire new bottomless well of it. He, Riley, had been feeding from Peter and Julia’s children, and Peter had been starved of it.

He wanted a big stick to stir Peter with, a great waterfall to push him under. They were both silent for a while.

‘What girlfriend?’ Riley asked suddenly.

A ghost of a smile passed over Peter’s face. ‘An American girl,’ he said. ‘Eight years ago. I relieved her of the burden of my existence.’

Riley’s mind flicked back – the night in Soho, Christmas 1918, when he’d pulled Peter out of the Turquoisine – ‘The singer?’ he said. ‘The negro girl?’ The kind-eyed girl who’d called Peter honey, and told Riley he was cute. Mabel. She’d had the look of a girl who could give and receive.