My Dear I Wanted to Tell You (25 page)

‘Oh, I say,’ said the officer. ‘I didn’t mean . . .’

‘Then don’t say,’ said Locke, staring at his glass. ‘If you don’t mean, then don’t say.’

The officer bolted.

‘What do you mean, “had his face blown off”?’ Nadine said, as if from an icy suspension.

Locke filled his glass and drained it again. ‘I was exaggerating,’ he said. ‘The man’s a twit. Eat up.’

Peter Locke got so drunk that he very nearly made a pass at her. Instead, he took her dancing at Le Crocodillo, and got into a fight because the wrong band was playing. There was a particular saxophone player, an American – ‘Mr Sidney Bechet,’ he crowed. ‘Why is Mr Sidney Bechet not playing here today? Only Mr Sidney Bechet,’ he told her quietly, confidingly, ‘has the power to SHUT UP the bloody noise in my head. Sorry,’ he said. ‘For saying bloody.’

‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘We all get sad. It’s only natural to be completely, utterly, fatally sad. Only a very sick person would not be made sick and sad by all this.’

‘I get to this stage where I jump in puddles and howl at the moon,’ he said.

‘It’s four in the afternoon,’ she said kindly. ‘There is no moon.’

‘There’s always a moon,’ he said. ‘We may not be able to see it but it’s always there.’

This seemed quite profound to them both.

Thrown out of the club, they got another bottle of champagne and went to the Tuileries Gardens, where the gallery was shut and the paintings evacuated, so they sat, and talked, and he was going to read to her but they fell asleep on the grass. A military policeman woke them.

‘Excuse me, sir,’ he said. ‘I know I didn’t wake you . . .’ he said meaningfully. ‘Could you tell me the time?’

They scrambled to their feet and brushed themselves off. Her body was stiff and chill from the grass, and her heart felt a warm strangeness from being with a nice person, an interesting person, a person connected with something that was real, once, even though it wasn’t now.
And if the war is ending, what is there left?

Daddy
, she thought.
I’ll find my daddy and crawl into his pocket for ever more . . .

‘I’m not going to be able to get away with this much longer,’ Peter was saying. ‘I seem to have lost all understanding of what I am meant to do.’

‘You’re meant to resist the Spring Push, sir,’ she said.

‘They won’t let me,’ he said sadly. ‘I’m unreliable. I’m no bloody good for anything. Oh. Sorry. For saying bloody.’

‘You have very nice manners,’ she said, as an offering, a suggestion.

‘Yes, I do, don’t I? There’s always that.’

She kissed him goodbye on the cheek, and felt his frisson. ‘Take this, anyway,’ he said. It was the book he had been going to read to her.

She walked to the station. She didn’t know how else to get there.

*

On the train back to Étaples she looked at the book Peter had pressed on her.
Light and Twilight
, Edward Thomas. A story called ‘The Stile’. The words fell clear and strong before her eyes. A man was trying to say goodbye to a friend after a walk, standing in English countryside, understanding the nature of being. It was the most beautiful thing she had ever read.

She read: ‘. . . something not to be separated from the dark earth and the light sky; a strong citizen of infinity and eternity . . . I knew that I could not do without the Infinite, nor the Infinite without me.’

She read it over and over.

When she got back, she wrote a letter.

21 July, Étaples,

Dear Riley,

I don’t know for certain if you are still at the Queen’s Hospital, or if you will get this. I am well. I went to Paris and met your Major Locke. At every corner I expected to see you with your arm around your new girl, and I spent the entire leave in expectation of being sick.

I hope you are well.

I have cut all my hair off. It was bad enough in London but out here it was just not possible. All fleas and lice, and impossible to comb. My life has been just iodoform, rubber boots, enamel dishes, squares of gauze. Little things fluttering round the gates of hell. Tomorrow they are moving us up closer to the front, ready for the big push. Already our boys die to the lullaby of guns. They ask me for permission to die, and I give it to them. They are afraid the doctor will be angry with them, or that they will be seen as cowards. They are so nice about it.

Riley, who led us into this blind alley lined with mud and corpses? Why do they talk of the sanctity of life when what I see before me is life squandered and trodden underfoot in the mud and pouring off the edge of the table, leaking and turning to slime? Surely what is precious is treated as precious? So how can life be precious when it is at every moment destroyed ignored humiliated neglected and left to seep away? We see before us that life is not precious to the big who, what, whatever it is that let this happen. That didn’t prevent it from happening. Was it wickedness or was it ignorance? It It It . . .

You probably know that I am killing my heart here. I cannot stand the pain it feels. I cannot do what has to be done here, with that pain going on. Sometimes a scrap of the woman I was before comes to me, the pull of a voice, the scent of a hyacinth, trees whispering – I die of it. It is impossible to be a woman here and not die of it.

I cannot bear to end this letter, to break this small contact with you.

I think of you all the time.

Nadine

When he read it, in a deckchair on the handsome York stone terrace at Queen’s, under the first blooming of heavy pink roses, his voice came. He was roaring, inarticulate, roaring. Nurses came running.

*

Riley wrote Rose a note:

Rose I had a letter. Please, write and tell her I have left here.

‘Oh – no,’ she said.

He wrote:

tell her no forwarding address

He added,

please

‘Oh, God,’ she said.

His eyes urged her.

She had seen a notice in a magazine:

Lady, fiancé killed, will gladly

marry officer totally blinded or

otherwise incapacitated by the war. . .

And she still had the scrap of paper where he had written ‘should marry you then’. She had kept it, like a schoolgirl, because it was, she felt, the closest she would ever get.

‘Riley,’ she said. ‘You could give her the chance. She might want to. You could give her the choice.’

His eyes were very articulate. As loud and as clear and as desperate as could be desired. No.

*

Dear Nadine,
In haste – I should let you know that Captain Purefoy has now left Queen’s Hospital. His surgery was successful and he left no forwarding address. Affect, Rose

*

That night Riley lay awake. He could hear the guns across the Channel.

He had done the right thing.

She needed someone stronger than him. He could not help her. He was, now, only to be helped – and not the way she would want to help. She would want to drag him back to the life and the light that he did not want. He could not gratify her in that. He had nothing to give. The only decent response left to him was to admit it.

He had to protect himself from her and her bloody love.

Chapter Twenty-Four

Sidcup and London, September 1918

A letter came for Rose, from Peter:

France,
September 1918
Dear Rose, Old girl,

Well I know I should have written before, I should always have written before, but there we go I didn’t, and I’m sorry. Anyway I’m writing now to tell you that I’ve been told I’m to go back to England. My position here will soon be closing, and I am held to be too ‘tired’ to go back to the Front, despite the fact that it is still all go out there and every Englishman in Christendom is going to be needed. Well. Every Englishman but me. I am to take leave, and that’s an order, and they’ll see about me in a month. I can’t say I’m happy about it.

They say I am to come home and rest. I don’t know exactly when. I’ll send a telegram when I’ve got my times. Could you tell Julia?

Your loving old Pete

Oh, thank God. Oh, thank God, he has escaped it, he has come through. It will be too late, surely, for them to send him back afterwards. Surely, surely, it will be over soon now. Surely.

But why hasn’t he written to Julia?

Julia was in London again. Rose rang her at the hotel she used.

‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Oh . . . ’ a sort of swoony gasp ‘. . . did he say when?’

‘He’ll send a telegram,’ Rose said.

‘Then I must – oh.’ Her breath was feathery and odd.

‘Julia? What’s the matter?’

‘Nothing! Nothing at all. Let me know when the cable comes.’

‘Well, it’ll go to Locke Hill, and I won’t be there . . .’

‘Harker can bring it to you. Ring up and tell him.’

Why can’t you ring up and tell him? It’s your husband, your house, your servant. And I do have other things to do, you know, unlike you with your lunches and your matinées and your . . .

‘Julia, why can’t you get back?’

‘I’ve got a few things to do here,’ Julia said. ‘I’ll be back in good time.’ Rose could almost hear her speedy heartbeat.

I suppose
, thought Rose, with asperity,
that
anything’s better than tuning the cello twice a day. I suppose.

Everyone was annoying Rose. Peter, assuming she would deal with Julia. Julia, assuming she would deal with Peter. Mrs Orris, setting herself up with Tom and never mind the effect on Julia, who should be looking after the poor little thing instead of going shopping and having massages all the time. Nadine, still banging on about Riley. Riley, still lying around like a week of wet Tuesdays.

Oh, come on. Who doesn’t annoy you?

Only Gillies. She envied him so much the ease with which he seemed able to deal with the human tragedy around him, his capacity to think about the science of what he was doing, to move smoothly on through the never-ending self-replenishing sea of pain and confusion without being sidetracked or capsized. And not only that he had these qualities but that he spread them, brought them out in those around him. Rose had thought, a year ago, that she was developing that medical knack. Jamison (
don’t mention Jamison. Don’t think about Jamison
) had caused it moments of instability, but overall she had been proud of it – until Riley capsized her. Riley with his eloquent eyes and his utter silence, his beautiful girl, his noble act, his enigmatic notes. None of the others who had come and gone, or come and stayed, had got to her. Just God rest Jamison’s soul, and don’t tell Riley. There was a reason they had always been on different wards.

Clenching her teeth, Rose sat down to her correspondence:

Dearest Pete,
I am so so happy to hear that you are coming back at last. We have been hoping ever since the Americans joined in that men like you who have been out so long would have a chance of some time at home. It has been so long we almost thought that perhaps you weren’t going to be getting any leave at all. Julia is delighted of course, and didn’t even ask why you had not written to her yourself. We’re all ready for you, and longing to see you.

With love from Rose

She liked the word ‘longing’. It sounded rather racy.

*

In a smart little London hotel room, Julia sat motionless for a while, thinking, trying to breathe steadily, wondering how much to say. As little as possible. It was so close to the end, it had to be . . . Everyone said it must be over soon. Dared she hope that Peter would not have to go away again? Dared she?

She had not written or spoken to her mother since the last disastrous trip to Froxfield. Every week she had sent cards or pretty toys to Tom, and every night her body had craved his presence. Her fury with her mother was immense, and her hand quivered as she wrote, carefully, politely, formally:

Dear Mother,
I am writing to let you know the good news that Peter will be returning from France any day now. Please arrange for Tom to be returned within the week. I know Peter would be very disappointed not to find his son at Locke Hill when he comes home from the Front.

With best wishes,

Julia

Before leaving town, she gave the letter personally to the porter, and asked that he make sure it went right away.

Back at Locke Hill, she stared. Time to take stock. It wasn’t the mirror. It wasn’t the light. It wasn’t the colour of her dress. It wasn’t the time of the month. It wasn’t because she hadn’t been regular. It was because she was getting older, and showing the stress, and that was all there was to it, and it had to be dealt with
now –
now!
– because he’s coming back!
And she knew what to do. Not surgery – not after the last fiasco – but there were other things a girl could do. The problem was that until she knew
when
Peter was coming, she couldn’t know if there was time. A week, they said, at least, for it to settle down afterwards. She’d been terribly sensible, asking about how it worked. Madame Louise just said ‘special formula’, but Julia had pushed, and discovered the ingredients – phenol and glycerine and croton oil (croton! A very ugly plant, she’d always thought, but you can’t blame it for that) – and Gladys Deacon had had it done, as had many of the beauties. Mostly it was for older ladies to get rid of wrinkles, but younger women would have it for the clarity and tightness it gave, and the pallor. Julia thought of the Boldoni portrait of Gladys, how she glowed like a lily, like moonlight, like snow. No sign of the scars and droops the nurse had mentioned.
I wish I could see her in the flesh, and ask her . . .

A week later, there was no news from her mother, and no news from Peter. She realised she had landed herself in a position of desperation without the possibility of action, entirely dependent on the responses – unforthcoming – of others.
I could have had it over and done with by now! And when the telegram does come, it might say he’ll be here the next day . . .
A moment of boldness seized her as she read the newspaper. No one ever achieved anything by hesitation! Did the men hesitate when going over the top? Did the generals hesitate in making those difficult decisions? If the Americans had not hesitated for so long after the sinking of the
Lusitania
, wouldn’t everything have gone quicker and better?

She fired off another letter to her mother; exactly the same wording. Perhaps it had been lost in the post. She was nervous to have been so straightforward with her mother. She clung to it.

Then she rang the salon, and arranged to go up the next day.
Serve bloody Peter right if I’m not there to greet him. After all, haven’t I been waiting for ever? And holding on to very little?
And aren’t I doing it for him anyway?

Oh, God, he’s coming back, he’s coming back – dear God, I know you’re busy but please please let him love me the way he used to please let him love me let me make him happy . . .

*

The frontage of the little salon was familiar to her now. Welcoming, with its pleasant memories of massages and facials and her pretty eyebrows, pedicures and manicures, loving attentions from Madame Louise and June, the silly young nurse with the very deft hands.

Lying on her back on the narrow white bed, consciousness fading, the gust of the smell of Lysol and chloroform was somehow promising to her, like a spring breeze. She was sad, as she went under, that she wouldn’t be present to witness, properly to experience, the melting of the crystals, the mixing with the oil, the coating of the solution on to her ready face, the layer of plaster to be painted on top. She was glad, though, that she knew what Madame would be doing while she slept, while the chemicals worked away under the mask, tightening and drying the surface layer of her tired skin into little flakes, which would then rub off and fall with the crumbling flakes of the drying plaster, revealing a naked layer of new young skin.
A chemical assault on the ravages of time . . .
She felt again the bravery and sacrifice, the modernity, the joy of it . . .
I am doing this for you, my darling. I will be everything you could want . . .

. . . She came round, staring through the tiny eyeholes of her plaster mask. It hurt, but not much. Phenol was itself an anaesthetic, Madame had told her.

The next week, the week of salves and balms and staying in, was maddening. At least there was no word from Rose about the telegram. Her face was red and burnt-looking, and as it calmed down, each day, it looked better. At least, it looked better than red and burnt. It did not look better than before the peel. She checked every day, every few hours, in between chapters of Marie Corelli, which made her feel as if she were eating entire boxes of chocolates at a sitting, but she couldn’t stop.

‘It’s made no difference,’ she said to Madame, on the telephone, and went round to show her.

‘Oh, but it has, madam,’ said Madame. ‘See, here at the brow, around the eyes, and those little freckles you had . . .’
I had no freckles!

It’s made no difference.

‘I think we’re going to have to do it again,’ Julia said.

‘That is not advisable, madam,’ said Madame. ‘Certainly not for some while. The complexion must be allowed to recover.’

‘But you can do me before Christmas?’ she said hopefully, thinking,
before my birthday. He’ll be back by my birthday.
She had decided that a while ago.

‘Oh, no, madam. Not till perhaps February at the earliest.’

Tears started in Julia’s eyes. February was far too late! Could she explain to Madame Louise? Would she understand, if Julia truly opened her heart to her? She looked at her, trying to judge whether there would be any understanding there of the situation in which Julia found herself. She feared not. Madame Louise was a working woman, with a role to play. Julia was beginning to see, intellectually, that her own role – pretty, useless, adorable – had been rendered valueless by the war. She half knew it. She half knew that other women found her pathetic, banal . . . She had felt the ground she was bred for slipping from beneath her feet during the course of the war, and she had seen other women finding new kinds of women to be – women who had not, before the war, been so totally bred for the altar of adorability and marriage.
I could have gone off with Raymond Dell, and been that kind of new woman; I could have driven ambulances, if Rose hadn’t so entirely scorned the idea; I could be a decent mother; I could, I could . . .

There was nobody to say to Julia, ‘It’s not your fault. You didn’t invent marriage and the traditional roles of women; you didn’t start the war; you didn’t choose to be valued only for your beauty, and prepared for nothing more useful than displaying it.’

‘Please,’ was all she managed to say to Madame Louise. ‘There’s nothing else . . .’ But Madame Louise was not to be persuaded, and found Julia tiresome, and went into the other room.

*

Julia went home in a new dress, looking wonderful, slender, elegant, with unshed tears and a sense of profound personal irrelevance rising within her.
Still
no sign of Peter or his telegram. Still no letter from her mother. Knowing it was neurotic, she plumped all the cushions in the house, tuned the cello and went back to London.

She came home in another new dress, ashamed of it, unable to stop despite how ludicrous it had become.
I’m a clockwork figure, rattling round and round in circles. I’m absurd.
No sign of her husband; no sign of her son.

She couldn’t believe the war wasn’t over. It must be over. She read in the newspaper that Guatemala had declared war on Germany.
Well, if even Guatemala thinks it’s safe to get involved, it really must be finished.

Everyone was on edge.
Perhaps I’ll go to Paris. I could go to Paris and fetch him! We could have a marvellous reunion . . .

She went back up to London.

Mrs Joyce thought she would sour the milk at this rate.

She came back again. She told Mrs Joyce she was going to bed, and wanted no visitors, ‘but call me if Rose rings up’.

Mrs Joyce hoped it wasn’t this flu.