The Heroes' Welcome (24 page)

And Riley said, laughing, ‘Lord, you’re right. The moment they realise it exists is the moment they lose it.’

‘That’s the point,’ Peter said.

He saw that this tiny scrap of conversation, for all its inherent sadness, gave Riley pleasure. ‘Can I show you something?’ he said.

‘Of course.’ Peter shuffled and Tom climbed down from his lap. ‘You’re getting big,’ Riley said. ‘Can you drive a car yet?’

Tom looked up at him and said, ‘No!’ in a tone of considerable delight.

Peter was fishing in the inside pocket of his jacket. He produced a small flat box, and proffered it: a string of pale golden pearls, on blue velvet.

‘Will she like them?’ he said. ‘Her birthday.’

‘I have no idea,’ said Riley. ‘Yes?’

They did go for a walk, hoping perhaps for the comfort of effort, the feeling of strength you get from striding through nature when she is being slightly uncomfortable. Riley felt it, and determined to find a way to walk more in London. Peter was just uncomfortable himself. He wanted to talk. He couldn’t. Riley, so capable, seemed to be drifting away from him.

*

Peter was there in the chair, wide awake in the dark, when Julia’s contractions started, long before dawn, two weeks early. She was turning under her blankets, giving the odd low moan in her restless sleep. He watched her fretful waking, and when she suddenly sat up with a cry, her satin eiderdown falling to the floor, he lit the lamp, took her hand, and gave her water from the nightstand. She was warm. He took the eiderdown and folded it on her chaise longue.

Soon after the late midwinter sunrise, in cool grey light, a dark figure in a dressing gown looked in, hair muddled. Nadine.

‘It’s started,’ Peter said to her, briefly.

She gasped softly, and whispered, ‘Have you rung for Dr Tayle?’

Peter looked at her impatiently and said, ‘Of course not. No need for a medic. No one’s hurt.’

Julia’s face glowed in the dim light.

‘How are you?’ Nadine said to Julia.

‘All right,’ said Julia. The women’s voices were quiet like ghosts, as if pretending they were still asleep, that it had not, actually, after all, started. ‘Probably do need the doctor though.’ She was a little out of breath.

‘Peter,’ said Nadine. ‘Would you call him? I can make Julia comfortable …’

Peter stared at her. For a moment he saw in her eyes the look – what was it? The woman who –
ah – yes –
when he’d been shot in the leg, and Riley had brought him in, shot: there’d been Riley, then the stretcher bearer with the eyebrows, then the nurse at the hospital at Étaples.

‘Peter,’ Nadine said. ‘Go on.’

He went. He rang the doctor at home and summoned him as if giving orders. He could see the light, such as it was, was coming up outside the drawing-room windows, and through the glass panel above the front door. Night patrol; dawn patrol. When he’d hung up the telephone he opened the front door and went outside into the cold cold air. There was a little frost; it crunched under his feet. He lit a cigarette and watched the smoke coil for a moment. Then he set off: down the drive, through the shrubs down to the spinney, across and round the back of the walled garden, into the paddock, up round the lawn and the outhouses, and back the other side of the house. All quiet. Only a rook or two yelled at him in their moaning way.

He re-entered the house and went to take off his hat – but he wasn’t wearing a hat. In the distance, over the low hill to the east, he could see an orange glow, the odd flare. There was no sound – odd. But he could see it. It was all going on.

He wasn’t sure where he was. Behind the lines, anyway – somewhere safe, for now. Nice billet. He’d better go and take a look around inside.

Just about then a medic turned up – out of uniform, sloppy – been off duty, presumably, but someone was yelling blue murder upstairs. The MO was taking his coat off and so forth, so Locke ran up ahead of him. If they’d set up some kind of hospital here someone should have given that poor blighter his morphine or something by now.

He burst in where the cries of pain were coming from – a room, a nice one, familiar. There were women in there – nurses – but the wounded soldier seemed to be a woman too, and yelling like he was still at the Casualty Clearing Station …

‘All under control here?’ he said, and one of the nurses – they weren’t in uniform either,
what is this place?
– said yes it was, but could he bring some hot water, as if they thought he was an orderly – ‘Not entirely my role, old girl,’ he said, but he went and got it anyway because needs must, though it did seem odd, and then he went back in and sat down, suddenly, on a small velvet chair, and lit another cigarette.

When the MO came up, he tried to steer Peter from the room – took his arm in a chummy manner, and tried to sort of lift him and move him towards the door. It was very embarrassing. They all seemed to think he should be somewhere else, whereas he knew for a fact that he needed to be right here. Though he wasn’t sure why. So he stood up, a head taller than the doc, and stepped up close to him and stared down at him, eye to eye, as if the doctor had committed treason. He said, ‘You do your bit, and I’ll do mine. How about that? Everything’s under control here.’ And he sat down again.

They didn’t bother him again after that. He just sat there, and smoked. He wasn’t going to leave the poor fellow alone.
Is it Purefoy? Ainsworth? Who is it?

They were doing some kind of emergency surgery. Evidently it went well, though it seemed to take some time. After a while – a long time –
hours?
– the soldier’s crying out and gasping and weeping stopped. The women stepped away from the bed. The angle of the doctor’s shoulders changed – there was a kind of rolling back, an assumed uprightness. He turned, carrying something:
It’ll be whatever they just amputated.
It was wrapped in cloth, and looked like some kind of small limb – half an arm, perhaps. Lower leg.
Poor bastard.

Within one moment he realised that it was crying, and that the doctor was trying to give it to him. Its voice was new and limp and high.

‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ Peter said, standing and pushing past to where the soldier lay, grey-faced and silent on tangled sheets. She seemed to be asleep, or drugged.
Just as well.

One of the nurses had taken the amputated limb, and was crooning to it.

What a bloody extraordinary—

‘Get this place cleaned up,’ he ordered. ‘And what is that thing?’

‘It’s your daughter, Peter,’ said a calm voice, a woman – and for a moment he was on a lawn in Paris with a beautiful black-haired girl, drinking, outside the Tuileries – and then he snapped back.

He let his head fall back, way way back. Raised it again, and found Nadine staring him in the eye.

‘Is everything all right?’ he said. The word seemed hollow.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘You have a daughter.’

‘Splendid,’ he said. ‘I’m just going to …’ and he smiled politely, and left the room.

*

He went into the garden again, for the cold clear air to clear his head. He walked round again, a fearsome concentration on him.
What the hell was that? What was it?

Every now and again, over the past year or so, he heard things which logic told him could not be there: snaky streams of cool saxophone jazz, late at night, in the Kent countryside; distant explosions in the office. His dreams had seeped a little into reality. He had accepted that. It didn’t seem too much. You wouldn’t tell anyone about those things anyway. They’d have you at Craiglockhart within the week, signed and certified as a lunatic.

But this?

He knew perfectly well that nothing as bad, as strong, as interesting, as terrible as the war would ever happen to him again. In effect, nothing would ever happen to him again. His entire life from now on would constitute nothing but getting over the fucking war.

*

He went back into the house – all the doors were double-locked, and he had to go round again to the front – and drank coffee, and smoked. Then the memory leapt out at him like something quite new, or something totally unreliable.

Baby!

Julia. Baby. Daughter!

He washed his face, washed his hands, and went back upstairs. There they all were. The baby was clean now, washed and pink, making damp little scrawling noises. Its face was rather purple. Julia lay back, exhausted, wrung out, smiling and gentle. Supported by cushions, she was able to hold the little girl, and she was trying to feed it, holding it to her beautiful white breast, blue-veined, marbled. ‘Don’t laugh,’ she was saying. ‘It’s the best way – honestly! I’ve been reading about it. It’s the best for the baby …’

Dr Tayle was saying that it would be better for her not to.

At that she sat bolt upright in bed, holding the baby close, and cried out to him that she would not be dictated to as to how to look after her child.

Peter stood in the doorway, a little crooked, smiling at her. She glanced up and smiled back. ‘Darling!’ she cried out. ‘Look!’

‘Well, well, all right,’ Dr Tayle was saying. ‘Good that you feel up to it. Jolly good. And as for you, young man,’ he said to Peter, ‘you need a proper night’s sleep, and you’re to come and see me. You look exhausted.’

Peter murmured something pacifying, along the lines that he would, of course, he’d take the dressing-room divan …

But he didn’t. He sat all day with Julia and the baby, talking, smiling, while Nadine and Mrs Joyce popped in and out, hurriedly seeing to the things they had thought they would have more time to see to. Harrington squares, towelling nappies, the crib. Burying the placenta. Someone had to call to see if the nursemaid could come sooner. Chicken broth and arrowroot biscuits for Julia. Cabbage leaves for when her milk came in properly. Lunch! They’d forgotten all about it. Mrs Joyce produced a lovely soup, and came up afterwards to congratulate Julia, standing in the doorway grinning like a fool, nodding and, ‘Well then. Well then. That’s good. Lovely little thing.’

Peter sat quietly and watched it all, accepting congratulations, being shaken by the hand and patted on the shoulder. Nadine telephoned Riley and Rose to tell them the news, and reminded Peter to ring Mrs Orris, which he did, aware of his healthy and normal disinclination to speak to her.
But shouldn’t a moment like this be an opportunity to be flooded with love and forgiveness?
He was not flooded with love and forgiveness. He was very aware of everything, as if drapes had been lifted, and windows washed. It hurt his eyes.

After lunch, Tom came up to the bedroom, and patted the tiny bundle.

‘Her name is Katherine,’ Julia said. ‘We’ll call her Kitty.’ And Tom said, ‘But she’s not a kitten, is she?’ and everybody laughed.

*

That night Peter climbed into the marital bed alongside Julia, gentle alongside her body.

‘Is this all right?’ he said, and she smiled, and said, ‘You can be nursemaid – wake up when she wakes!’ and he kissed her, very tenderly, wrapped in miracle.

*

In his dream, he was holding his wife, and they were very happy.

*

He was woken by blood, blood everywhere, flowing, warm blood.

The weight of her body was against him –
German boy, oh, poor German boy …

Burdett Lovall Jones Atkins Wester Green … STOP IT!

He pushed back the blankets and scrambled from the bed. He didn’t want his bloody dreams to disturb her, to pollute this bed, even. He stood on the mat for a second in the dark, thinking,
it’s so real.
He could make out the glass jug of water on the nightstand, glinting a reflection of some scrap of light: he poured it over his hands.
Sticky.

He tore off his pyjama top.

It is real. I’ve believed such things to be real before, in dreams, in confusion – but this is real.

Real blood is all over me.

He went back to her: he took her in his arms. She was all blood, and blood swept through his mind.

*

That was not where the others found her. Twelve hours after the last patrol he had made around his garden, seeking out any dangers that might threaten his people, he carried the corpse of his beloved out from his tent and laid her like Patroclus before the walls of Troy, at the foot of the lawn.

Locke Hill, December 1919

They were out there, both of them. Julia was lying down; Peter sitting by her on the grass, in the dim wintry dawn. It looked for all the world as if she were reposing, having a picnic among the icy bones of the garden, the stiff twigs and frozen seed heads. It looked romantic.

What on earth are they doing?

Nadine saw them from her bedroom window, 6.30 or so in the morning. What she saw didn’t make sense. She went down the stairs, cold feet in slippers across the hall, through the drawing room where the French windows hung open, across the grey and green of the winter lawn. She saw the white nightdress clinging, streaked and drenched from waist to hem with scarlet. She saw Peter smoking. He was wearing his greatcoat, and Nadine thought,
He could have taken that back and got the pound for it. Too late now, probably.
His pale chest was bare inside the coat, and his face was smeared.

Nadine walked across, shivering, bent down, sat by him. She reached over and took Julia’s hand. It was not stiff, not yet quite cold. Nadine held on to it, and put two fingers across its pale wrist. Nothing was happening. No movement, no small throb, no warm blood.

‘Are you dead?’ Nadine whispered. ‘Julia?’ She couldn’t take her eyes from her face: the white skin, the closed eyes, their deep sockets, the fine skin of the lids. No movement. The veins seemed empty. Nothing but bone within the white skin.

‘Julia,’ she whispered, and with great and tender care she reached across and put the pad of her forefinger to Julia’s white eyelid. The gentlest movement slid it up, as delicate as skin on the surface of warm milk. The eye beneath was the emptiest thing Nadine had seen since … well, Nadine had seen empty eyes before. Nothing there but the very slightest cloudiness.