The Heroes' Welcome (17 page)

Afterwards they all went to the pub, including Ermleigh, who creaked when lifting a pint, as well. He had a wife and children. To him, Riley talked. Not about anything in particular. In fact, the not talking about anything in particular was particularly what they did. The four of them sat in the snug at the Eagle, talking gently, making silly jokes. Hinchcliffe was going to get a motorcycle. Ermleigh painted watercolours. Owen just wanted to keep his father’s business going. They found something very calming about each other.

Coming out, Riley was thinking:
I’m not going to be the chap with the buggered-up face who gets in fights. I am going to be the chap who does – whatever it is I do. The chap who wrote that book, who published those pamphlets, founded that college, set up that publishing house. Perhaps someone might say, Wasn’t he injured? And someone might say, Oh yes, I think he was. But that would not be the first thing they said. I’m not going to spend my life just surviving the war and my injury. I’m going to live my life.

They sold four of the pamphlets in the pub, and afterwards Riley brought some home.

Nadine smiled.

Sir Robert said, ‘Good man!’

Riley sold them to his fellow students. Hinchcliffe gave a batch to a friend of his, a teacher at another college, who sold them there. Ermleigh took some to the chest clinic. An ex-serviceman’s benevolent society heard of them and requested a sample. A little bundle went up to Wigan, and another to Cardiff.

*

Riley felt mildly sick walking up from the station towards the hospital. The same trees, the same buildings, the same blue benches. Gillies had offered to see him at his clinic for officers at Regent’s Park, but Riley had said no, he’d come down to Sidcup. Now he rather wished he hadn’t.

There’d be fewer patients.
Well, that is good. That is good. No more admissions. Men going home. To what? To family? A job, or chance of one? Somebody to grind up their bloody meals for them?

A few days ago had been Peace Day
.
The crowds had gathered and the whole of central London had gone bonkers – the park was full of people camping, Allied soldiers from all over. He could not bring himself to look out of the windows at the front of the house. He did not want to see soldiers in camps, and the glorification of military victory. What, was he to put on his medals, with their cheery nicknames – Pip, Squeak, Alfred, and Services Rendered – plus gallantry and wound stripes, and head off for a jolly day out remembering the dead?
The King had issued a message to the wounded: ‘To these, the sick and wounded who cannot take part in the festival of victory, I send out greetings and bid them good cheer, assuring them that the wounds and scars so honourable in themselves, inspire in the hearts of their fellow countrymen the warmest feelings of gratitude and respect.’

Well.

It wasn’t a sense of being respected that inspired that crowd in Wigan, or the police in Liverpool, or that made the ex-servicemen in Leamington and East Anglia have nothing to do with the celebrations, or the men in Luton burn down the town hall. That wasn’t why there were riots from Wolverhampton to Epsom, from Coventry to Salisbury. There were employers in Manchester refusing to take on demobbed soldiers because they’d missed out on four years of experience. Four million returning servicemen, three million munitions workers discharged, one-and-three-quarter million wounded. Women who’d worked men’s jobs all through the war being turned out and expected to go home quietly, or back into service. Two-and-a-half-million workers on strike. Revolution in Russia.

Patriotism. Best use of funds. Well. Welcome home, lads. Or am I being churlish? Flags and tea and choirs – isn’t that all right?

Well. Jobs and money would be better.

Good cheer – that was Jack Ainsworth’s phrase. Be of good cheer, in the prayer he carried around. Good cheer was chin up, basically. Chin up, Riley. Artificial chin.

Same entrance, different chap at reception, same corridor. The garden behind vaguely and unidentifiably changed. The lawn dry and hard after the summer. Fewer patients.

Gillies was in his office, and greeted Riley with joy. ‘You look almost handsome!’ he said, and was interested in how the sunburn on his scalp-clad chin differed from the rest of his face.

‘It’s weathered,’ Gillies said. ‘Settled in. No pain? No tension in the skin?’

‘No,’ said Riley.

‘You’ve had a bash,’ he said, touching the cheekbone. ‘Remains of a black eye. I hope you’re not taking risks with my handiwork.’

Riley flushed, and said nothing. Gillies prodded gently, murmuring, ‘No pain? No pain?’

‘No,’ said Riley.

‘Healed up well. Whatever it was, don’t do it again.’ Then he stopped. ‘What was it?’ he asked. ‘Temper? Someone have a go at you?’

‘No,’ said Riley.

‘I thought you could handle that sort of thing,’ Gillies said.

‘I can,’ Riley replied. ‘I do.’

And that was true. He behaved terribly terribly well. All the bloody time. Almost.

Gillies was still staring at him. ‘Looks like a single blow,’ he said. ‘From a weapon of some kind.’

Riley turned his head away, annoyed. ‘I’m not ten,’ he snapped. ‘My head’s my own, whatever you’ve done to it. And don’t patronise me with one of those “hohoho you’re being uppity that’s good there’s life in the old boy yet” answers.’

Gillies said nothing – turned and did something to some papers. In a moment he came back and said: ‘Smile for me?’

Riley smiled rather bitterly.

‘Yawn? Can you?’

Riley could. He did. It was far from the biggest yawn anyone had seen, but it was a yawn. Gillies measured it with a small ruler.

‘How’s the eating?’ he asked. ‘Liquids, solids? Chewing?’

‘Improving,’ Riley said. ‘I didn’t take on any horse steaks in France.’

Gillies was continuing to gaze at him, musingly.

‘Sorry,’ Riley said. ‘Not for getting clouted. But I shouldn’t have said that. Of course you have a perpetual interest in my face and its functioning.’

‘Don’t worry about it,’ Gillies said. ‘You’re absolutely right; you’re a grown man. So – your voice sounds a lot better – mind if we run through some of the exercises?’ And Riley chanted the tongue-twisters: once again Peter Piper picked his peck of pickled peppers, the ragged rascal ran round and round his rugged rock, and down on the seashore she sold her eternal supply of seashells.

‘And how are you?’ Gillies asked, finally.

Riley gave him a dark sideways look. ‘And you were doing so well,’ he said, at which Gillies laughed.

‘Well,’ he said. ‘And, so, work and so forth, have you found something?’

‘I have,’ Riley said, and he smiled properly, and took a couple of the pamphlets out of his pocket.

‘Here,’ he said.

Gillies took it to the window for the light, and read it from cover to cover – eight pages of simple, straightforward, cheaply produced practical advice.

‘Can you let me have five hundred?’ he said, and Riley smiled.

‘You don’t have that many inmates, sir,’ he said.

‘I’ve got a great many more ex-inmates,’ Gillies replied. ‘Everyone who’s left here in the past six months will get one. D’you have them in stock? I’ll give you the cheque now, anyway. And what’s next?’

Riley took another piece of paper from his pocket: a list on which he and Hinchcliffe had been working.

‘How to Write Good English’

‘How to Balance your Finances’

‘How to Make the Best Impression’

‘How to Apply for a Job’

‘Everyday Good Health’

‘Basics of Science for the Intelligent Working Man and Woman’

‘History Up to Now for the Intelligent Working Man and Woman’

He pointed at that last one and said: ‘I’m going to write that myself. And we plan an annual “How to Educate Yourself”.’

‘A Practical Guide for the Autodidact,’ said Gillies.

‘Exactly. Nadine will design the covers.’ Actually, he had only just thought of it.
But what a good idea!

‘How will you finance it?’

‘No idea.’

‘Well, let me know if you need investors. I might be able to help.’

That easy? Then I must aim higher …

‘Now—’ Gillies looked at his watch. ‘D’you want some lunch?’

Riley smiled low, and said, ‘I don’t eat with people.’

‘Am I people? Really? Oh well, let’s take a stroll then. We’ve made some changes. It’s quieter now, much quieter. There’s more time to get things more right.’

Locke Hill, July–August 1919

Rose’s Further Correspondence appeared. They were going to give her £800. She was going to study at London University and then at University College Hospital. She would start in September. If she needed more support in future, she was to be in touch with them. She was a clean hatching thing, with wings to spread and a strength and power that had to be acknowledged.

Her life was not over. She was not some dull unloved creature with no purpose, she was not alone, halfway through a dreary life to a dingy death.

The boldness of it! In so many ways she was surprising herself.

Major Gillies shook her hand, said he was proud of her, and sorry she would leaving. Should things not go as planned, he said delicately, she would be welcome back.

‘Do you doubt my abilities, Major Gillies?’ she asked, with the playfulness permitted by their imminent separation and the time they had worked side by side. But she half meant it. She was proud now. Woman Doctor! She bloody well would be the Woman Doctor.

‘No!’ he said. ‘No, indeed. On the contrary,’ and they smiled and it was a little awkward. So then he said, if she ever needed a reference, and so forth, and it was all all right. She would have time for a holiday, even. Scotland, she thought. And so a period of her life was ending, and spinning off.

But to leave Locke Hill! Well, the strangeness should have been in leaving Peter and Julia – but neither of them were there. And that in itself was so strange. The falling apart of things which even if they had not seemed … strong, had seemed permanent.

How much we take for granted!
she thought, as she folded her vests to pack them.
We all said to each other, oh of course, nothing will be the same now – and here I am, surprised because things are not the same. This period of my life will become like my schooldays, calved off from my life like part of an iceberg, drifting away in the distance as I sail on ahead, until I can’t see it clearly or remember that much about it. How will I look back on these past years? As something marvellous and character-forming? As something important? And shall I have many more such sections of life to live through and then to lose?

For a moment she wondered whether she was a ship sailing through the universe of her life, or whether she was a rock, around which the river of her life flowed. Then she decided it didn’t make that much difference, in practical terms, as she still had clothes to wash and dry, because she was not at all persuaded by the shared laundry at the VAD medical student hostel. And after Scotland she was going to be working very hard.

But the main issue was Tom.
That is a child
, she thought,
who has been left enough
–
but he is not my child
. Mrs Joyce and Eliza were his daily companions; they fed him and scolded him and were fond of him, in the manner of decent-hearted women paid to do such things. But it didn’t seem to be anybody’s job to love him.
But it’s not my job … though …

It can be difficult for a capable woman to leave things alone. Rose felt she could – should – do something … She, the only responsible adult, couldn’t just walk out of this house, leaving Tom with the servants. What a ghost house that would be! Operating around a child, financed at a distance, the absent drunk father, the absent runaway mother, no love, no centre, no …

The pang was strong. How could she even
think
of—

Deserter!

But it is not mine! None of this is mine! Well, it is mine – but my life is mine more – isn’t it?

*

Rose went up to London.

Directed by Blakeman, who was quite reluctant to encourage a lady to go to such a place, she went to a pub by the river in Chelsea, and there she found Peter. Blakeman had suggested she go down around noon, and she had understood why.

She walked in boldly, nose in the air, respectability her backbone and good humour her defence.
She
was not scared to walk into a pub. It was hardly likely that anyone would take her for an artist or a lady of easy virtue! (A tiny part of her laughed, and thought,
If only! –
but just for a moment.) She walked up to the bar. It was like being in a foreign land, and she engaged the same courage.
Actually
, she thought,
never mind Scotland. Why not France, or Spain, or the Alps? The Alps!

That made her think of Julia, the bolter.
The thing about bolting is that you must have something to bolt from, and nobody who has not lived your life can understand and judge whether or not your bolting is justified
. Rose thought of Julia, in Biarritz or wherever she was now, ordering drinks, buying French toothpaste, sleeping in French sheets, being free. Was she happy? Did she think about her deserted boy, rattling around in that deserted family home?

Try as she might, and angry as she was with her, she still found it hard to blame her. Except for on Tom’s behalf. Then she found it very easy.

But Julia is not the only deserting parent here.

Rose raised her head. She was here now on Tom’s behalf.

She surveyed the room, with its dark wood panels, dim recesses, etched-glass windows like dirty milk. She saw men. Cigarette smoke. Worn and faded jackets, shapeless caps, hats with brims a little shiny. Braces and shirtsleeves, frayed cuffs. Rolled-up sleeves. Ties, limp with age. Pints of beer. Smell of sweat in cloth. Tired eyes and seamed cheeks. Some crackles of jollity; one or two strapping fellows, red-faced with sunburn, noisy and laughing. A few murmured conversations. Many solitary and silent figures. Newspapers. Coughing. Several sticks, a pinned-up sleeve. Scrawny shoulders, hunched backs. Worn shoes. Cheap suits.