My Dear I Wanted to Tell You (28 page)

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Sidcup and London, towards Christmas, 1918

Returning to Sidcup, Riley went straight up to Gillies’s office in the big house. He banged on the door. Gillies answered impatiently.

Riley said: ‘Gi-lee.’

A curious, tender look appeared on Gillies’s face.

Riley took a breath, and said carefully: ‘See. S-pee . . .’ He had trouble with the
p
, so he did something with his tongue behind his upper teeth to approximate it. It sounded as if goblins were pulling it in different directions, and a couple more were hanging off the end of his tongue.

‘Yes?’ said Gillies.

‘Ke,’ said Riley.
Can he understand me?

‘Well,’ said Gillies. ‘Evidently! Well done, Riley, well done.’ He had not expected this. He had expected that the muscle loss, and more particularly the attitude, would conspire against. (He had been thinking about muscles – whether it would be possible to move the masseter, split it perhaps, form a sling of some kind that might allow movement and control, proper closing of the mouth, less droop, re-creating the oral sphincter even, where the lower lip had been lost . . .) ‘Did you talk to your friend in the north?’

‘No,’ said Riley. And his cheeks lifted, and his eyes elongated . . .
He’s smiling
, Gillies thought.
Well, thank God for that.

‘I a’ o’ good chee,’ Riley said.
Ch
, he noticed, came out more
t
-based.

‘I’m so sorry, Captain, you are doing awfully well but I simply couldn’t quite make that out,’ Gillies said kindly and briskly.

Riley stretched his cheeks again.

*

He wanted to throw away his notebook, to be brutally demanding of himself, but Rose persuaded him against it. ‘I still want to be able to understand you quickly,’ she said. ‘Long sentences. You know. For practical purposes.’ He grunted. Grunting seemed like good exercise for little-used throat muscles.

Riley dreamed he was laughing.

He said to Rose: ‘Locke?’

She hadn’t known he knew Peter was due.

‘Eeta?’ he said. ‘Is he not here?’ He’d wanted to say, ‘Not coming?’ but the m, like the
p
, the
f
, the
v
, the
w
– anything using the bottom lip – was just not available to him. Yet.

‘No, he’s not here,’ she said. Riley watched her.

‘I don’t know,’ she said, to his unasked question. ‘He’s due. He was due weeks ago. We don’t know where he is.’

Riley grabbed his notebook.

Rose how can you be embarrassed in front of me after everything? You know where he is.

‘No, I don’t,’ she said, shocked.

Riley wrote:

he’s drunk. The only question is, where is he drunk? answer – somewhere you can’t go. So I will go.

‘What?’ she said. ‘No!’

He wrote:

He and I shared trenches for three years. You’ve been feeding me and washing my face for fifteen months. No secret shame now Rose. No secrets. I’ll go and find him. London? Or Paris?

Rose said, giving in, ‘Well, I assumed London.’

On Christmas Eve Riley wrapped his coat around him and got an early train. He’d developed a way of wrapping his scarf loosely inside his turned-up coat collar so that the bottom of his face was concealed but he was not muffled, and if he chose to speak, his words were not hindered by it.

The frames of countryside and backyard rattled by: muddy remains of vegetables, stark trees, unidentifiable outdoor kit draped in worn grey tarpaulins. Riley thought about hibernation: spiders in their funnels like puffs of solid white smoke, in the folds of tarpaulins; furry creatures in piles in burrows, cold-blooded things in icy ditches, waiting, semi-conscious. It was an unlikely time of year for a hibernator to wake up. Was it just because It was Over? Was that all it took to send his mind trundling off again in a new direction, believing in possibilities?

He didn’t think so. He could have remained in the misery. He could have remained there for ever. The misery wasn’t far away – look, it’s just over there, lurking next to the idea that this armistice is just a pause, and that the war will start up again any day (because if it’s really over, why are so many men still Over There?).

Over.

There.

The misery is always going to exist. Lethargy, misery, nightmare and shame.
The thought shook him to his bones. But – knowing it was there made it easier to avoid. He was safer in the knowledge of his enemy’s location.
And I will be miserable again. Oh, I will. We all will. This relief is no more permanent than anything else, but the misery will be easier to bear knowing that this other feeling is possible too.

I can’t be alone in this
, he thought – and the smile sensation came to him again as he realised the ambiguity of the thought:
(1) there must be others feeling the way I do, and for similar reasons, and (2) it is necessary that I find company.
I will make friends
, he thought,
and rediscover friends, and look after friends. Well, that’s what I’m doing.

Bit by bit.

Two voices from the seats behind him emerged into his consciousness. Women.

‘Lost a leg, and he’s blinded,’ one was saying. ‘Well, I don’t know. Would you want to live?’

He wanted to say— He wrote a note, tore it off the pad, laughed at himself, and leant over the back of the seat pass it. ‘Dear Madam, Forgive me, I overheard your conversation. I was badly wounded in the face at Passchendaele, have had some operations, and am trying to learn to talk again. I do not know about your acquaintance [He had almost written ‘I cannot speak for your acquaintance’] but I for one have never loved life more.’

When they looked back, he put kind, accepting reassurance into his eyes, as best he could, and tried out a shrug, with an upturned palm, friendly, helpless, non-threatening.

Well!
The women practically kissed him.

It was interesting to him how much better he felt for having written it down.

*

On Victoria Street, he caught sight of himself in a shop window. He stopped a moment to look. Still broad-shouldered, still strong.
I look like a man and a soldier
, he thought.
I am a man and a soldier. I am twenty-two years old with a pretty heart and a brave mind and a horrible past and a face that – a face that – a face that is fucking horrible. Half horrible.

‘
Not that frightening.
’

I am a man and a soldier.

Now I just have to behave like one.

And then I have to learn how to be a man without being a soldier.

The shop was a gentleman’s outfitter. He stepped inside. Blue leapt out at him. Blue like the summer sky, like hospital blues, his mother’s eyes. He chose two long scarves, one silk, one wool, one azurite eggtempera Renaissance Madonna blue, one paler Pre-Raphaelite Alma Tadema blue. He paid, and he left, and he looked up, and his feet stopped themselves, and his eyes rose higher.

Across the road was the hotel where he had holed up with Nadine in the spring of 1917. It looked unbearably shabby. He could see the window of their room. He was standing in what had been their view. A profound shudder shook him from head to feet, a sickening wave, a punch, and his ribcage gaped within him. He didn’t even know where she was. He had cast her off. He had deserted her and betrayed her, out of fear. He had not trusted her. It was nearly two years since he had seen her, and he did not even know where she was.

The little girl had patted his cheek.

Yes, but the other one had cried at the sight of him.

Yes, but Annie had patted his cheek and said, ‘It’s not that frightening’.

Well, Nadine would hate him now anyway. She would be over him. Two years! She would have found people to love her everywhere she went.
She will be fine. Beautiful girls are always all right. It’s girls like Rose who suffer.
He should marry Rose.

He remembered, with little pang, that he had said that to her once. Which had perhaps not been kind.

Who’s talking of marriage? He would never be able to ask any woman to take him on.

Wounded Captain Purefoy, with the not-so-frightening face . . . That’s neither a husband to offer nor a job for life. Who am I now? What am I meant to do now?

A wave of panic was right there.

He stepped aside – physically, on the street.
One thing at a time
.
Bit by bit. I’m meant to visit my mother, and I’m meant to find Locke. That’s what I’m meant to do now.

His mother was after work. Locke was after dark.

What do I love?

He turned into town, and walked towards Trafalgar Square and the National Gallery. He wanted to look at Sebastiano del Piombo’s
Raising of Lazarus
.

*

Bethan, when she saw him, wept and gabbled in the doorway of the little house. He had to hug her close to shut her up, to muffle her against his chest. She pulled him inside, pulled his coat off him, wheeled him into the parlour, winter-dim. She lit the lamp and the fire and he noticed:
My mother is living without a fire unless there is company, in December
. The girls and Dad were out.

He stood away from the window to unwrap his scarf, to show her. Held his hand up to her in gentle warning. It should have been a momentous moment, revealing to his mother the visible mess that history had made of her son’s face, but it was no more to him than something he had to do, a job required of him.

Bethan, when she saw his damage, said quietly, ‘Oh, Riley, oh, my boy . . .’ and she started to weep, and he let her, and soaked her up, contained her as a glass would melting ice. He would have to tell her how to be with him. That was his job.

He wrote her a note.

Mother. It’s going to be all right. I promise.

‘But how?’ she wept, and he silenced her again against his tunic, and then wrote:

Weep as much as you like mother I am and it is going to be all right

‘But your lovely face . . .’

new face now mother plug-ugly like dad

She giggled. Howled. ‘But you can’t talk . . .’

He said, fairly clearly despite the goblins, ‘Actually, I can talk.’

She howled.

He hugged her.
I can do this.

‘You come back and live at home when they’ve finished with you,’ she said, later.

No, mother.

‘You’ll stay here tonight, at least.’ He wrote:

I’ve things to do mother. Sorry. I’ll be back soon and I’ll write to you.

He didn’t know where he would be spending the night.

‘But it’s nearly Christmas, Riley,’ she said. She had thought he was back for Christmas. That the war was over and her son was back for Christmas. Her disappointment flooded and eddied over her previous confused joy. There were too many feelings for one face, but Riley could hardly see beyond his own relief and gratitude. She’d seen it, she still loved him. Had he doubted she would? It didn’t matter.

Not demobbed yet,

he wrote.

‘I suppose,’ she said.

He wrote,

bit by bit eh mum? You know I’m safe anyway.

His smile was almost comfortable.

‘You’re smiling.’

Yes, mother.

‘You look almost happy.’

Working on it, mother.

*

I have to learn to look at people looking at me, to see what they need from me, and to give it to them. My face gives an outlet for everything else – the fear and the loneliness and the long years apart; it gives a visible focus for it. I am always going to remind them of the war, and they will thus always remind me, and I am never going to be able to forget anything.

*

It was a cold evening, dreary. The glowing glass roof of the station stood out like a gigantic beetle against the purple sky. Shop lights smeared and dissolved, golden and gassy white in the watery air. The pavement was greasy, the street quiet. No horse-drawn cabs – no cabs at all. Riley hesitated a moment before ducking into the station, pulling his scarf round his face as he entered the underground world, hiding himself from it and it from him. The corridors were tiled and lit up.
It’s nothing like the trenches
, he told himself.
Completely different. Nothing to worry about.

His mother had tired him. Travelling had tired him. Seeing the hotel in Victoria had tired him. The National Gallery had put him in a state of shock. Botticelli’s
Venus and Mars
– the beautiful creamy girl, the naked sleeping soldier – had given him an erection, which had amazed and confused him. Heart and soul, body and feet, he was tired.

Not the tiredest you’ve ever been, though, eh?