The Heroes' Welcome (7 page)

Or it might have been:
Rose, don’t go. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean that. Of course you belong in this house. You can stay here for ever. Of course you can – you must – dear Rose. Don’t leave me here alone with Julia, with her dead face and her blaming eyes, and that poor child who stares at me like some kind of Cyclops. Rose, come back and have a drink with me. Come on. Sit down, come on. It’ll be nice. Let’s just forget about everything for a moment – for a few hours …

*

Before the war, after Oxford – where he’d managed to stay on a few years as a junior fellow, teaching and so forth, which had suited him very well – Peter had been steered into the family firm with a view to learning the business. It had not agreed with him, and the moment his father died in 1914 he had left. It was his shame and his mother’s good intentions that had steered him back there in January 1919. He had bowed his head and taken it on: part of his punishment. He had failed in so many ways, due to his own unworthiness as much as the idiocy of his leaders. Well, he determined, if he wasn’t good enough to die with his men, and since the Army couldn’t wait to be rid of him, he would at least make a go of being all that was marvellous at Locke & Locke.

He started on a dull grey morning, late January 1919. There was a meeting to welcome him, and lunch. His father had left a very practical team: they had not on the whole had to fight; they were self-perpetuating; and they respected Peter, as major shareholder, scion of the family, officer. Nobody would tell him he could not have his corner office and the lunches they assumed he would want, once he had his balance back, which everyone thought they understood would take a little while.

There was a young man there who had been instructed to update him on developments and practices, to type his letters, to, what, keep an eye on him? Peter sent him away, and settled in to catch up.

He didn’t really like the look of his office. There was something oppressive about it, and the books seemed rather wrong on the shelves. The filing cabinets seemed very full, and he felt observed. He needed, he decided, to know exactly what was where. That would help him to feel at home, as it were. So he took every book and every file from the shelves and cabinets – that way he would know how far he’d got, and wouldn’t miss anything out – and he stacked them on the floor, and unpacked them, and began to read.

Uncle Eric, wheezy, blinking, and old, who had been running the show, came in to see how Peter was getting along. He found him sitting on the floor like a grasshopper, his long legs folded, knees up by his ears.

‘Not sure you really need to go through everything in every file,’ Uncle Eric said, mildly. There were only a couple of other men in the office who had served. Uncle Eric had not, and he was wary.

Peter looked up politely, and said, ‘Don’t you trust me, old man? Not allowed to read my own pa’s company papers, is that it?’

‘Not at all, not at all,’ his uncle responded, looking foolish and apologetic. ‘Just, well – you do as you think best, and come to me with any queries.’

And Peter did not press him. His uncle’s concerns were transparent.
I am not trusted
, Peter thought.
My judgement and my capacities are doubted. They know I lost men over there – do they know that those men and I were like fingers on a hand? That I held my men’s lives in trust, and they mine, and they are dead, and I am not? Do these civilians have the slightest understanding of what that means? They have been told that I drink; they probably know I was dragged out of a low club by a better man than me.

I understand that.

I will prove them wrong.

In the month of his service he proved it by arriving earlier than everyone else each morning (which required the doorman to come in earlier to let him in, an extra three-and-a-half hours’ pay per week); staying later (requiring the doorman to stay late, at variable cost and annoyance to his wife, depending); and by refusing the lunches where he might, with the charm and intelligence they recalled from before the war, have been useful with potential customers. His main project was to refile everything in the recent archive according to a new system of his own. Putting the ledgers and legal notebooks and jute files of thin silverleaf paper into the right places seemed to him honourable work, and it made him feel safe –
well, not safe. One is never safe in this world …
But there was a small joy in it. Of course the oldest should be on the bottom and the newest on the top. It made sense! He had read about an ancient Chinese system where the position of items in a household or workplace had an effect on the fortune and spirits of the inhabitants and workers … he didn’t go so far as to believe in it, but
of course the new must lie on top of the old! It’s how the planet is built, how history works, layer upon layer. It was morally and aesthetically wrong to put the new things at the back of the file. We are going forward towards Utopia after all, not harking back to Arcadia! Arcadia kills you, because it prevents you progressing into your own future. Odysseus knew that, when he made them tie him to the mast while the Sirens sang – you know what the Sirens sang of? The story of the Trojan War, of the fallen heroes whom Odysseus knew so well. Backwards looking. And the only way Odysseus and his men could get their boat to keep moving towards home was to block out those Siren songs of the past, of the war – which was its own kind of Arcadia, and love of which would keep a man from Ithaca for ever … and Odysseus had to listen to it all, all the corpses and the blood, and get past it.

So my filing system is right.

‘Do you know what his name means?’ he asked his uncle.

‘Whose name?’

‘Odysseus,’ said Peter.

‘No,’ said his uncle.

‘Sower of discord, bringer of trouble. Same root as odium. And odious.’

‘Ah,’ said his uncle.

‘He was tremendously unpopular,’ Peter said. ‘After all, he lost all his men. He comes down as being wise and wily and so forth, but he lost eleven ships with all hands, and his own entire crew. Seven hundred men. Makes me seem a lightweight.’ He watched for some response.

‘Mmm,’ said his uncle.

Uncle, I have just confessed to you that I let my men die – Uncle?

Uncle?

It’s just as well. If they knew what was going on my mind, they’d put me away.

Sometimes he heard the barrage still, crumping away. He supposed it couldn’t be real. Some trick of the ear and the brain and the nature of time. An echo.
Unless it’s still going on, and we’re being kept in the dark, as usual.

*

Peter’s new system did not match the one everybody else used. It was, he said, better. And he was right. But that did not seem to be the point.

‘Never mind,’ he said. ‘I’ll put everything back. No really, it’s no trouble.’

And he did, thinking about the Augean Stables. For weeks.

At a meeting in late February, Uncle Eric suggested that new stationery might be in order, as the old was looking rather fusty. New world, new times, and so on. That afternoon Peter, without consulting or budgeting, chose a design, approved it and ordered a large consignment.

‘But why waste time?’ he said. ‘You said it needed doing; I did it.’

The next day he sacked the assistant, who was, unbeknownst to Peter, the son of Uncle Eric’s mistress. ‘He wasn’t helping me,’ Peter protested. ‘I don’t need an assistant. I don’t need help. I know you resent paying the doorman extra – so we can save money here. And I’m up to date on the contracts now, so I’ve an idea or two for this year and next …’

Uncle Eric suggested that Peter, with his academic and archival talents, might like to have a go at applying his new filing system to the old pre-war archive, which was kept in the Birmingham office.

Peter smiled his distant, charming smile, and felt himself drifting away, back, back, blown by winds he could not control.

Uncle Eric, without telling Peter, rehired the assistant to go through and check everything that Peter had recently refiled.

*

A few times during February and March, while he was trying to be civil in town, returning each night to Locke Hill or Chester Square, Peter was asked by someone or other at his club what he was up to now; or his mother would telephone from Scotland, inviting him to visit and wanting to know how he was. He actually could not say that Locke & Locke had rejected him. And of course they hadn’t. They still paid him. He still had a desk, in his oppressive office. If he went in, which he didn’t much, Uncle Eric would enquire mildly about the archive in Birmingham – to which Peter never went. Other than that, they didn’t say anything.

‘I know what’s happening here,’ Peter told the barman at the club, politely. ‘I’m HMS
Iolaire
. Two hundred men after four years of war, shipwrecked and dead on the shore of their childhood home, their families waiting on shore to welcome them. Like Odysseus’ last boat, when the crew let all the winds out of the sack just as they reached Ithaca, and the storms blew them away. For another ten years. Nearly home, starting to relax, and your own damn folly sends you back out there. I do understand. I really do.’

The barman wiped the glasses.

*

Sometimes, when he caught sight of Julia from behind, in a doorway, or when the dog bounced up to him, his tail high and feathery and hopeful, Peter would be struck with a poignant scrap of … something … a little taste in his mouth of how things used to be –
of how I used to be
– and then he could almost see a thin skein of desire strung across some part of his being, a high wire, a cobweb, invisible except in certain lights when it might flicker, or glisten, inaccessible, and he would imagine for a moment that if he could only reach that evanescent, tiny wire, and somehow take hold of it, follow it, walk along it, even, balance on it over the void, through this chasm, then it would take him … somewhere …
somewhen? No such word. There should be.

He used to like the dog so much. No more. Dirty creatures. Eating God knows what they found in the fields.

That winter he and Riley had walked out on the Downs, in the brisk wind which, as it made conversation impossible, was appropriate to their shared silence about their shared experience. Once or twice, he had felt a wild urge to tell Riley about the dreams where summer rain turned into blood, the dead men, the cheap women, the drink and the shame. He had wanted to tell him that he could not continue to sleep with his wife because the weight of her body beside his was that of the dying Hun boy in the shell crater, and he could not make love to his wife because the feeling of her body in his arms was – not even was
like
,
but
was –
Bloom’s corpse, which he was carrying in.
Bloom, Burdock, Knightley, Atkins, Jones
…
Remember Jones? He looked like a sausage – well, he did! A big raw pink sausage. And then in the summer –’17? – he got sunburn, and he looked like a half-cooked sausage. And Burdock – was it Burdock? – joked about wanting to leave him out in the sun to cook all the way through, so they could eat him. (And Burdock had pulled Jones’ corpse in, and someone had said: ‘He’s all yours now, Birdy, cook him however you like.’ And the next day Burdock caught it himself. Or so we assumed, because no one ever saw him again. Though Smiler Rogers saw some guts and a bit of fair hair.)

He wanted to tell Purefoy about the dying German boy.

‘Captain,’ he murmured, on one occasion, but Riley, when he caught the military word, shot him a look, and Peter could say nothing.

He was quite certain that Riley had things he wasn’t saying either. They were both able to take a bit of comfort from leaving it at that.

And in between his dreams of Loos and the Somme and the eighteen hours in the shell hole and the weight of Bloom’s head on his shoulder, Peter would sometimes dream that he had gone on holiday, taken a train, and stepped off at a quiet station where the sign on the platform read, clearly, 1912, and Julia and Max were there, and they were all happy, and they came in a motorcar back to this same house, this same house where he had been a boy, and ate scones with jam.

Even in this dream he did not feel safe. He felt safe only when passed out: feeling nothing.

Sometimes when he awoke Tom would be standing by him, clear blue eyes watching.

France, April 1919

Riley was out in the world again, and Nadine was terrified for him. She was scared for him being in France again – but it was so different here in the south, he said. Even the language, they agreed, did not sound like the French they had heard in the north. He could feel as if they were in a different country: this sun, these astonishing colours. Olive trees, lizards, lavender. It was nothing like – there. And she knew that to be true.

Peter had insisted on giving Riley and Nadine the honeymoon as a wedding present (despite Riley’s reluctance to accept gifts, which he maintained despite Nadine’s desire that he relax about money). Peter had always been rather sentimental about his own honeymoon (
probably it was the last time he and Julia were really happy
,
Nadine thought.
Perhaps the only time
)
.
A little hotel in Bandol had been organised for them.

They arrived at night, rattling from the station under a black starless sky, and with no idea of surroundings other than smells – jasmine, pine – and sounds – rattling harness, creaking wheels, the bizarre orchestra of cicadas. In the morning, Nadine threw open the shutters of the cool dim bedroom, and when she saw the beauty that was before her – the radiant glory of blue dancing sea, green musing pines and golden glowing sunshine – she burst into tears.

Riley rolled over. ‘What is it?’ he called, alarmed.

‘I’m alive,’ she said. ‘To see this. Look at it. Look. All this was going on all the time we were so bleak.’

*

They ate fish and fennel, smelt mimosa – what a miracle that was
–
and sweet broom and salt. They swam in the spring-fresh sea. Nadine bought Riley a fisherman’s shirt and, it turned out, developed freckles on her nose and forehead. The hotel had a small boat in which they paddled up the calanques in search of kingfishers and turtles and flamingoes. Over and over they found themselves grinning and gasping over something lovely. The scarf that constantly lay double-coiled around Riley’s chin or throat began to be left to hang in a single drape, relaxed, protecting only the back of his neck from sunburn, not his scars and his dignity from the eyes of strangers.