The Heroes' Welcome (15 page)

He was not going to stand for Parliament. Part of him wanted to – to counteract pests like Mosley, who had won Harrow on the sheer force of his own self-belief and ignorance, and to hold strong to the idea of change, that England could be different now, and better. That it could honour its entire population, not just those with the money and the titles. But there was the vicious circle: he had no money and no support. And more to the point, it was not, after all, possible for him to go so directly into the world to challenge and influence it. It was not that his courage had declined – certainly it was not being challenged the way it had been, but it was still there all right. No, the point was that he could not and did not want to squander so much of his courage on being looked at.

He had supposed that he had grown accustomed to his appearance, and to the effect it had on people. Being at the Queen’s with the others in similar conditions; being tucked away at Locke Hill; being abroad, where, to be honest, things didn’t matter, because he wasn’t sticking around, and he wasn’t trying to build anything, being wrapped up in Nadine’s love and her own courage, he had perhaps underestimated what still remained for him to deal with. Perhaps he had thought that dealing with something was a finite business: deal with it, and then it is over. Or, deal with it, and then you know how to deal with it. But that was not his experience. He dealt with it over and over and over, continually, continuously.

His pride was low, slow burning and constant. He suffered everybody’s kindness, he had hugely enjoyed his time in France and Italy, he was beyond joyful that he and Nadine had – oh, God, he was glad – but he found that actually he did not want to have to present himself to strangers. Without an arm or a leg, perhaps he could have campaigned. But without a clear voice and clear human expressions on his face? No. He could not represent the people when he didn’t even want to meet them. So Parliament was not going to be the way he would contribute.

Anyway, he was busy. Nadine, usually so sanguine, humorous and reliable, had been distraught about her mother. She was deeply confused about the vagaries of her grief, how its guilt and its paucity could co-exist with sudden streaks of searing loss and misery. Any death brings back every death that went before – she had not known that. She had been flicked back to the state of shock and loss they had all known so well during the war. And half the letters of condolence came on black-rimmed mourning paper, and half the guests at the funeral were weeping for funerals that would never happen.

Riley considered the differences: this kind of death; that kind of death. He dropped his eyes, and thought:
The deaths the women witnessed were men who were already lying down. The men I saw die had seconds earlier been standing, running, fighting, smoking, talking.
He wondered if that made a difference to how one learnt to live with it.

‘Why didn’t I like her?’ Nadine asked him. ‘Why didn’t I love her? Everybody else loved her. Father loved her! Why couldn’t I?’

‘Because she was the Queen of Sheba,’ Riley said. ‘Anything that happened to her was more important than everything that happened to anybody else.’ He remembered it from before the war. Often it had been a joyful thing: wardrobes of half-used clothes laid open for the chosen to help themselves, astonishingly generous presents, parties she threw, glamorous people she brought together, admirers, Robert’s musicians, young men she had crushes on, young women with crushes on her. ‘You felt that what she gave you was given for her own glory, not out of love,’ Riley said, and Nadine smiled at him because he was telling the truth, even though it was harsh.

‘It’s a shame she never took the trouble with you,’ she said. ‘That she never bothered to get past everything. You understood her better than I did.’ Riley hugged her. He hadn’t lost a parent. He couldn’t go on wanting all her attention. A whole man doesn’t crave attention from his wife in mourning for her mother. But he wanted it.

The loss was compounded by the fact that, on their return from Italy, they moved straight in to Nadine’s childhood home on Bayswater Road. Why would they go to Chelsea when the house was empty but for her father, standing there like the last reed in an empty lagoon, desperate? Riley accepted that Nadine and Sir Robert both needed it. A house of grief is a house of grief, and there is nowhere to go, nothing to do. Just wait.

‘You take her room,’ her father said to them. ‘I don’t need it. I’m in my dressing room. You go on …’ so Nadine and Riley had found themselves in among all the
stuff
,
her mother’s detritus, the scent bottles, the underwear, the stockings and books and …

Riley took one look, and found it unbearable. He had married Nadine, not her mother’s ghost.

‘Do what you want with your mother’s things,’ Sir Robert was saying. ‘I know I should help you, but …’ and with that he had gone out of focus, and Riley very much wanted Nadine to say to him, ‘Papa, I can’t do it on my own,’ but it seemed she couldn’t say that.

Riley telephoned Rose.

*

It was Rose, of course, who helped; who found the dress shop to take the good clothes, and the charity to take the everyday ones, sorted the papers with Riley, sent the ugly jewellery to the bank and told Nadine, in tears over the jewellery case, that it was absolutely all right, indeed necessary, that she keep and wear the little emerald ring she was holding and staring at.

‘I just wish it had been different,’ Nadine said, meaning so many things –
everything, really
–
Dad’s widowing, my mother’s wastefulness – what was it I said? We’d have time to get over our tiff? Something – ha! Never assume, never assume. And now she will never have the chance to know what her son-in-law really is … and I have lost the chance to make up with her – pigheaded – and now Riley is being strong for me – well, he’ll like that – but he’s so tender – I must not forget him …

And Rose, though she couldn’t know what Nadine was thinking, was there to agree.

*

Riley chafed. He had looked forward to the two little rooms in Chelsea, rent to be paid by him, because he was
going
to be earning, and then things would be right. At the moment, Nadine had an allowance from her father, which was bigger than Riley’s pension. Riley hoped that Gillies was not going to suggest he had his pension reviewed, with a view to an increase. He did not want an increase and he did not want to talk about it. He was still glad that the whole pension issue had been dealt with by someone else while he had been out of action, because to be honest he’d rather have no pension at all.
But, yes, I am a married man now.

He did not actually know anyone else in his situation: wounded, scarred, a class-traveller, semi-educated, proud – so it was to himself that he talked. Coming up to a year after the end of the war; three years since his wounding. It
was
time to do and to act again. How was he going to be? The trip to Italy had been magnificent. The rediscovery of Nadine’s love had been transcendent –
Oh, sweet Jesus, if anything could make a man a man again, that could.

But now?

More.

Specifically, work. He had to work. He had to choose, to decide – to commit. All around him were unemployed men.

*

He had been visiting his father. After the first couple of times, he took to going on Sunday mornings while his mother was at chapel. She was so angry with him, and he could not make it out. She did not treat him as she used to. It was as if he was not himself to her. Since the day when she had burst into the ward and not recognised him …
does she not recognise me still? In some ironic metaphorical way? Is she angry with herself? Or with me?
He suspected that it was her keenness not to make him feel singled out by extra kindness that rendered her harsh, and then regret at her harshness made her suddenly sweet again. It was tiring. But that would be his mother’s way. Elen, if she was there, took little notice of him. She made it clear she had better things to worry about: the heels on her dancing shoes; a kitten she found in the street; appointments. Her own life.

He did not feel capable of putting it right. He would, though. It was on his list.

Merry, on these occasions, gazed balefully from behind the teapot and occasionally snapped at them for their harshness, weeping and saying, ‘How you can be so unkind to him, after all he’s been through?’ and giving him extra cake, which he couldn’t eat, which did nothing to make him feel better.
Well, there we go, feeling better is not everything.

His father John was the one who made sense. He would sit in silence while they both looked at the paper, or played a game of cards, saying nothing when there was nothing to say, and from time to time saying something thoughtful.

‘Is it time to start working again, Riley?’ he asked. ‘I should think you’d be tired of sympathy and fuss.’

‘It is,’ Riley said. ‘I’ve got a plan. I’ll keep you up to date.’

‘Good boy.’ A smile. He didn’t need anything more.

That’s all there is really, isn’t it? Work and love, love and work.

*

His education had been bothering him – or rather the lack and patchiness of it.

Immediately on his return to London, after doing what he could to help Nadine and her father in their quiet, debilitating business of condoling, reliving and weeping, he had located a working-men’s college, and of his own accord re-entered the path of self-improvement he had been on before the war. He took classes in history, political theory, English language, French and Italian. His days, largely, were free, but almost immediately he found a way to fill them. He pretended that he had none of his blessings. He sat in a café with one cup of tea for hours, feeling fake but at the same time feeling more authentic, in some ways, than he felt at home with his lovely wife in her father’s house. One morning, leaving a café in Queensway, he saw a card advertising for a waiter. He stepped on outside, looked up and down the road, leant a moment against the yellow brickwork between the shop fronts, swallowed a couple of times. He stretched his mouth wide, tapped his tongue to the roof. He went back in. His hands clean, his clothes good, his face well shaven, his mouth exercised, he enquired of the woman about the job.

Very civil, she said, ‘You’re a fine man and no doubt steady on your feet, but you’d put the diners off their food.’

He paused a moment, waiting to see if some burst of anger or shame would make him reel inside.

It didn’t.

He nodded. She was right, anyway.

‘Thank you,’ he said, and turned to go.

In the early edition of the
Evening Standard
there was an advertisement from a typesetters, wanting a man. They were just on the Harrow Road, so he walked up there. The girl on the desk gave him the ‘you’ve lovely eyes what a shame’ look. He glanced across to the men on the floor in their brown coats; they glanced back. He’d spent an hour, once, with the chaps who used to do the
Wipers Times
. It hardly counted as experience, but he’d liked it: the precision, the smell, the skill.

The manager in his shirtsleeves sat Riley down, asked him various questions, nodded at the answers, didn’t write his name down. Riley said, ‘You haven’t written my name down.’ The man smiled, nervous, and said ‘Pardon?’

Riley stared across the desk at him. ‘Are you pretending not to understand me, because you have no intention of employing me?’

The man kept the nervous smile and made a face as if to say, I’m sorry I didn’t quite catch that.

Riley was ninety-nine per cent certain he was putting it on. He tapped his finger on the desk, thoughtfully. Then swiftly he stood up and walked, under the man’s protestations, back to the setting room. He looked around: there were the tiny print blocks with the letters of the alphabet, all the fonts and sizes, upper and lower, spaces, punctuation. There was an empty frame, waiting to be used.
Foolish
,
Riley thought, but he did it – grabbed the letters from the nearest array and wrote out: ‘If you want a man to think you are taking his application seriously, you need to write down his name.’ ‘Name’ came out as a widow, so he kerned between the words to bring it back up. The font was spacy on the rack, so he looked for leading, did the little calculation of size, slotted it in. It didn’t take long. The expostulations from the manager died down. The men were glad of the interruption. They just stood around watching him till he finished.

Now what?
Riley thought.
Print it? Hardly. They can read backwards anyway.

And:
that was unnecessary, really …

He glanced up again at the men, bit inside his cheek, nodded to them. Left.
Yes, that was childish and embarrassing, but perhaps I made a point …
He wasn’t angry. He liked the accoutrements of printing, though. But no, he didn’t want to be a typesetter.

Time to investigate the other end of his social territory. An art gallery in Cork Street needed someone to write their catalogue entries and co-ordinate exhibitions: he’d written to them and the letter, with Sir Alfred’s endorsement, had been well received. But in the flesh, one look at Riley’s face turned the nice young man pink and flustered, as in the kindest terms he explained that he didn’t really – that this was Cork Street – that the kind of people with whom one would – well – and Riley just thought,
Poor boy
, and said to him, ‘Never mind.’

Later, walking up to Piccadilly Circus, he found his fists clenched.
Why now? Did you expect the middle classes to respond better? No, it wasn’t that.
He shook his head to clear it, and stepped up into Soho, into the first pub he saw. Staring into a pint of half and half, he thought,
I might have liked that job. I could’ve done that job. I wouldn’t have been dealing with the public. I had a top-of-the-range recommendation for that job from a bona fide member of the establishment, and even so the lad wouldn’t even look at me. Even if – though? – I am only looking in a spirit of enquiry, it’s a depressing bloody outlook.

Such assistance as he located, in practical matters of adjusting to civilian life, was attached to churches, temperance societies, and virtuous women of a certain age. Everywhere he looked, he found a shortage of information – or anything else – to assist the semi-educated war veteran –
myself
.
Myself, if I hadn’t the advantages of having gone up in the world. Which I have, and I still can’t find anything.