My Dear I Wanted to Tell You (14 page)

Accept some little seeds and crumbs of chocolate for the small creature in your pocket. Stroke it from me, tell it to hold on. I am back now in the harness and we go up the line in a few days. I’ll write to you again before we do. My love, my love – all my love. Do you know – today, I am happy. I am happy because we love each other. That, perhaps, is madness.

I am not scared. I have – well, you know – only one regret.

Only yours,

Riley

Locke was combing his damp hair. Purefoy knew what he would say next.

‘Fancy a drink, old man? Wet the baby’s head?’

*

They went first to the Golden Goose, pushing through a disconsolate queue of men waiting for the brothel just round the corner, and sat by the window. The pretty red-haired girl, who swore her name was ‘Gingaire’, gave Purefoy a kiss on the cheek for his new third pip. The female breath made him shudder; she noticed, and called him
mon capitaine
, before going to get their bottle of champagne. Carefully she unwrapped the foil, released the cage and eased the cork. Even so it popped wildly and foamily, and Purefoy smiled. Locke gave him a look, and poured the beautiful bittersweet wine.

‘Ah, the reliability of wine,’ he murmured, taking his glass. ‘To wives and sweethearts. And babies.’

Outside, a wave of grumbling had started among the men in the queue.

‘After eight o’clock!’ a voice was calling. ‘Officers only now! On your way, on your way.’

‘Not very happy about it,’ observed Purefoy, glancing out, tipping his glass this way and that. Ginger’s father had acquired some fine crystal coupes from somewhere, which he kept on a linen runner in a mahogany cupboard for those he called ‘his’ officers.

‘None of us are, are we?’ said Locke, and Riley saw his eyes were glassy, with grief, with previously taken drink, with . . . he couldn’t tell with what.

Purefoy longed to talk, to be able to talk, to talk to this man he liked, but this was not the conversation he wanted.

Some of the men were bustling into the Goose. Frustration bubbled in them, and they smelt of it. There was an animal quality in killing, which Purefoy had seen and felt and recognised, and now he saw and smelt something similar in this frustrated queue. He found it disgusting, pitiable, touching. All that masculinity, in the wrong place, nothing to do with it.
If things were different, scientists would be discovering and labelling whatever it is in us that stinks when we are lustful, or violent, and whatever it is that coats our tongues in metal when we’re frightened, why a shuddering heart sends a voice into a squawk, and releases our bowels and the strings that hold our skeletons together. Or perhaps there are scientists – greybeards – doing that, in Edinburgh and London and Berlin. Or perhaps they are all too busy inventing better faster quicker bigger bombs and rockets and aeroplanes and poisonous gases. How would we know? We know nothing. We are just here.

‘Do you love her, Purefoy?’ asked Locke. Purefoy looked up. Locke seemed shy to be asking it. Purefoy liked this delicacy, a fastidious sweetness, like an intellectual vicar. If Locke had to name the female part, thought Purefoy, he’d pronounce it like Sir Alfred, in Latin, in some ancient form belonging to some special college they’d been to. Purefoy had once had to take Messalina to the vet. There was something wrong, Sir Alfred had said elegantly, with her
waggeeenah.

Poor fucking Locke.

‘I love and adore her, sir,’ he said.

Locke gazed at him softly. How can he love and adore her? How does he manage to do that, now? He wanted to ask him, but didn’t dare. ‘Sit down and get drunk, Purefoy,’ he said. The desperation was beginning to creep up around the edges of himself, dark stains seeping. His heartbeat was increasing. Soon it would take on the wild pattering and then how could he silence it?

‘And let’s go next door,’ he said. ‘Let’s go next door, and love and adore.’ Or, at least . . .

‘Not for me, sir,’ Purefoy said, as kindly as he could. But when Locke jumped up, Purefoy went with him. He didn’t like to leave Locke alone.

The brothel had been the doctor’s house. The remains of red-hotpokers sprouted among the shaggy ornamental grasses in the front garden, and a big bed of golden-orange day lilies shone madly against grey stone in the evening sunlight. The river ran alongside it, giving it a wildly overgrown damp green lushness shocking to the men coming from the front. It was really quite charming. Purefoy waited inside, among the tall, heavy cupboards filled with bottles of protargol and potassium permanganate and
preservatifs
, next to the hunting-scene prints and a view of the Cloth Hall at Ypres from the south. He couldn’t help reading the notices about Lysol and Vaseline and foreskins, signed off from the morality section of the police.
The sooner we win the war
, he thought,
the sooner Nadine will not have to look at other men’s parts.

He sat down on one of the doctor’s wife’s handsome chintz chairs and closed his eyes. It was important to him that he should take Major Locke back to the billet all right. He dozed, and dreamt he was hurling sunflowers, sending them spinning into a green and gaseous night.

*

Upstairs, Locke was with the usual girl. He was on familiar terms now with most of the patchouli-and chemical-scented
putes
, in the course of trying out a new proposition: that if there were a living girl in his arms, the corpses of Bloom and Atkins could not come and take up their place. It didn’t work.

*

Purefoy was waiting for him. They picked up another bottle and went back together against the hurtling glow of the bombardment, like a great and perpetual and abominable dancing sunset in the east, in the wrong direction. They spent the evening listening to the scratchy, ghostly music of Locke’s Victrola. After Purefoy left, Locke put on Leo Szilak singing ‘
E lucevan le stelle
’, and was able, for a minute or two, two-thirds of the way down his second bottle, to think about how sweet, how beautiful, how soft to the touch his wife was, and how she knew in so many different areas exactly what he liked, and about how he could make her mew by starting in, and then stopping, and starting in again
.
Then the wounds of the flesh became conflated again in his mind, and he took a whisky or two, just to settle himself.

Chapter Twelve

Sidcup, January 1917

The baby was beautiful. Clean pink soft little thing. She loved him the moment she came round, with a desirous, hungry, laughing love. It wasn’t that. The first luxurious, voluptuous, sleepy two weeks, she simply would not physically let go of him, just fed him day and night, watching his ecstatic rolling eyes, his cheeks getting visibly plumper by the day . . . When her mother or Mrs Joyce tried to take him, she just sent them away. But when she got ill, and neither of them could stop crying, it was probably all for the best to have let her mother take him back to Froxfield. She was right about the airships. She was right that Margaret would be better than Mrs Joyce. And of course it would have been wrong to keep another girl from war work by trying to hire a nurse. And of course Julia couldn’t cope with the baby on her own. And if Dr Tayle said that Julia wasn’t well enough to travel, well, she wasn’t well enough to travel. Everyone agreed it was quite selfish of Julia to want to keep the child with her, under the circumstances. Sentimental, even. Sacrifices had to be made and, really, when mothers all around were sending their sons to the front without complaint, it was quite ridiculous for Julia to kick up a fuss about her baby. Boys have to go away sooner or later anyway, don’t they? Julia, Mrs Orris made clear, should pull herself together.

So when Julia emerged from her fever, weak, swollen-breasted and alone, it was to find that it was her own fault for being so useless, helpless, sentimental and stupid. Her mother was surprised, too, at how she managed to look both fat and haggard, and how her eyebrows had gone pale. In their last conversation before Mrs Orris left with Tom, she had said: ‘It’s astonishing, really, when you’ve been so ill, how you can still be so fat. You still look pregnant!’ Julia could see for herself her poor belly, huge and flaccid, dimpled white, like uncooked dough, streaked with stretch marks.
But it was for Tom – it’s all right, it was for Tom . . .

At least the milk had dried up now. The pain! It was worse than giving birth. And apparently it takes longer to dry if the baby is there, wanting it. So that was one good thing. She had liked the pain, though. The thrill of involvement and deserving suffering had, she felt, united her with Peter. She, too, had had a bloodbath, a dreadful wound in a good cause. Her body had been ripped like a soldier’s. The scars were a different matter. The recovery . . . She was beginning not to feel like an animal any more, ‘like a milch cow’, her mother had said distastefully. But she had liked being sucked at and pummelled. It was so real and intense and useful. She had loved it – being loved, and eaten alive, by her beautiful son. Her breasts, dry as they were now, ached for him. Her arms were empty.

‘What do I feel like now?’ she whispered, peering into the mirror.
What am I? Apart from fat and haggard.

When she was well enough to come downstairs, she tuned the cello, and thought about when she would be well enough to go to Froxfield. Then she plumped the cushions. Then Mrs Joyce came in and told her not to exert herself.

She stared out of the window.

She fell back on the cushions and stared at the ceiling.

She picked up a copy of
Vogue
her mother had sent, and read: ‘It is lamentable that the far-famed beauty of the Englishwoman must suffer from the terrible strain her country is under-going.’

She let it fall.

She picked it up again, and read: ‘It is her duty to use every means in her power to prevent the effect on her beauty . . .’ She turned the page: a picture of Countess Bathurst looking absolutely gorgeous in her Red Cross uniform.

Her clothes didn’t fit any more. She couldn’t even get into the green wool dress, let alone do it up. Her mother had written to Peter, and they’d got a letter back. Her mother had read it to her, and then put it somewhere, and had gone off before remembering where. Julia couldn’t find it.

Her body missed its child, in sweeping flurries of ferocity. As soon as the doctor said she was well enough she’d go to Froxfield and she’d bring him home. Her mother couldn’t just
keep
the baby, if Julia made clear her position. Margaret could come here!

She knew her mother would never let Margaret go.

‘Stupid stupid selfish stupid,’ she muttered.

*

‘I’m going to London,’ she told Dr Tayle, some weeks later. ‘Rose needs to go up and I can go with her. We shall have some fun! I feel quite up to it.’

She looked in the shop windows and felt depressed. She sat in the foyer at VAD Headquarters reading her
Vogue
(longer lines, a straighter profile, younger models, shorter hair and an ever-more-slender shape) while inside Rose was interviewed for her transfer to the new hospital, which was to be called the Queen’s Hospital. Darling Rose.

‘Have you come to volunteer?’ said a languid girl, with a boyish crop and a pile of files, passing by.

‘No!’ squeaked Julia. ‘I can’t! I have a baby!’

The languid girl looked around, vaguely, as if to see where the baby was, and moved on.

Even a girl like that is useful
, Julia thought. She pulled herself up. ‘Tell Miss Locke I’ve gone on, would you?’ she said to the receptionist, who was at least fifty and ugly.
But of some use, unlike me.

In the first shop, she bought two lip rouges.

In the second, she looked at corsets, but could not bring herself to try anything on, to ask, even, what size she was now.

In the third, she bought a hat, a low, close-fitting thing, in which she felt she could hide, while still looking slightly chic.

In the fourth, she considered having her hair cut short.

In the fifth, which was upstairs from the fourth and part of the same establishment, she read the list of aesthetic treatments and, encouraged by an elegant and very slender European woman in a white coat, decided to have a clay facial to tighten and brighten her complexion. It felt so nice to be touched that she decided to have a massage, ‘to refine the figure,’ said the European woman. Her name appeared to be Madame Louise.

For perhaps the first time in her life Julia’s nakedness embarrassed her. But the masseuse said nothing, just pummelled and twisted her body rhythmically, almost lovingly, up and down, lifting and placing her limbs, sweeping off ripples of tension.
Perhaps
, Julia thought,
I don’t look that bad, or how could she bear to touch me?

Madame Louise smiled at Julia when she came out of the little massage room, pink in her clean white dressing-gown, the uniform of beauty therapy. ‘You look so relaxed!’ she said. ‘Really beautiful. What else can we do for you today?’

Julia looked at the list. Oh, why not?

Eyebrows.

‘We can do it now,’ Madame Louise said. ‘You won’t need to stay in. But a low-brimmed hat will be necessary if you are planning to go out and about.’

Well! Julia had the hat right there. It felt like an omen, a benediction.

She wrapped her dressing-gown around her and lay back on the hard bed and the clean white pillow, and had her eyebrows plucked out completely and replaced by fine, sweeping arches of tiny fluttered black dashes, tattooed in on either side. Madame Louise did it herself, and Julia felt as if she had been promoted from the mere masseuse. The needles prickled her skin like electricity. It hurt. She liked it. She felt professional.

Madame Louise suggested she might prefer not to look, immediately afterwards – but she did. She wanted to, and she was glad when she did. Blood and ink were wiped from her forehead; and two long black streaks flared like wounds across her white brow. Madame Louise showed her how to apply the special oil, how to dress them to keep them clean.

‘The little scabs should appear in the next day or so, and they’ll be healed in a week. It is very important not to pick.’

Julia appreciated her serious tone. There was after all blood, and permanence, pain for perfection, recovery. Julia was suffering for what she was good at. She was serious.

‘Well, that is a good start!’ announced Madame Louise. ‘And . . .’ she gestured delicately around Julia’s jawline ‘. . . when Madam is interested in something for the slight . . .’

‘What?’ asked Julia, turning round, flashing.

Madame Louise made a little apologetic
moue
with her painted mouth. ‘There’s just a little . . . slackness . . .’ she murmured.

‘Oh!’ cried Julia, as if embarrassed to be so caught out.

Madame Louise passed her the magnifying mirror.

‘Oh,’ said Julia again.

Their eyes caught. The woman looked awfully sorry to have to be the one to bear the bad news.

‘Do you . . .?’ asked Julia.

‘Oh, yes,’ said Madame Louise, reassuringly, as if relieved to be on safer ground. ‘Dr Lamer . . . some wonderful techniques . . . would you . . .?’

She would. She went in to see Dr Lamer right then. He had a few minutes before his next client. He was a discreet, serious little man, well dressed, kindly. He had studied in Berlin. He had been in America. Many advances had been made and were being made all the time, so ladies were able to feel completely safe now, knowing that procedures had been tried and tested . . . Yes, he
had
met Major Gillies, at the hospital in Aldershot, a very different line, of course, but some marvellous work being done there, he had heard, great advances.

Julia thought of Rose, and blushed a little, and corrected herself:
What I am doing is valid! It’s just as valid as Rose. Not everybody can do the same things, and Rose can’t be pretty and keep a man happy and I can, so I’ll do it to the best of my ability. Wife and mother.

She came out of the beauty studio feeling light and strong, her new hat and fringe positioned carefully to cover the bandaged blazon of her patriotic new brows.

How wonderful, to know such things could be done. How wonderful.

Dr Lamer had said she was to think about it. About her jawline, which, of course, she had thought about often before, particularly with reference to the fear that it might end up like her mother’s. About the things which could be done to avoid that. And there were other things, more urgent, such as (1) her figure!
Well, a steamed-fish reducing diet would see to that
–
or I could get one of those rubber corsets. You just wear it, and perspire, and become slim . . . or take up dancing like Isadora Duncan in a Poiret gown.
And (2) her poor breasts – or did they count as part of her figure?
Dr Lamer could probably do something about them too. Peter need never know . . .
And her nose! Her imperfection!
After all, Gladys Deacon had her nose done with paraffin wax, years ago, and whatever they say about her she is SO beautiful – that portrait by Boldoni
. She’d read somewhere that Miss Deacon had had the statues at the Louvre measured by a professor of aesthetics to find the perfect classical proportion because she wanted the straight, classical Greek line, no dent at all from the forehead to the bridge . . .
Peter admires her, I know . . .

There are all kinds of things I can do
, she thought.
I will turn thirty more beautiful than I was at twenty, and that will be my gift to Peter, when he comes home.

She strode busily past Liberty, without even glancing in the window of the houseware section, despite the presence there of some really quite alluring peacock blue glass. A vast new territory of improvability was opening up before her eyes as she swung back up the road.