Thirty-Four
Ned was let out of the convalescent home at the end of February 1918. His leg was healing reasonably well, and the doctor said he should soon be able to progress from walking with a crutch to a stick. Eventually, perhaps barring a very slight limp, he should be back to normal. He didn’t say ‘fit for duty’ but Ned knew that was what he meant.
‘You’ll be able to come and stop with us, son,’ his mother said. She was looking forward to having him there, he could tell. His brother Fred was in France, and she had at least one of her sons where he belonged – at home. She was longing to look after him, fuss round him.
He felt like a stranger in his parents’ house, although every inch of it was disconcertingly familiar. He spent the first few days resting, waiting to feel normal, to find himself again. More mobile now, he soon became restless. He couldn’t concentrate on anything, and found himself wandering without purpose from room to room, looking at things. There was the table at the back where he had eaten breakfast and tea every day of his childhood. His bedroom – also at the back – overlooked a short strip of garden where his mother grew marigolds and pansies in neat beds, though now she had taken some of them up for vegetables. He saw the same old wooden bedstead, the faded hazelnut brown eiderdown, the little table where he had done his homework with scratches and ink marks and in the top right-hand corner, a hardened patch of glue. His father’s chair with the round patch worn thin and oily where his head rested. Things from which he now felt cut off: a past when he had been innocent of both love and war.
‘How d’yer feel today?’ his mother asked every morning, carrying him up a cup of tea on a little tray. Even the cups and saucers were unnervingly familiar.
‘Not too bad,’ he’d say. ‘Better.’
In truth he felt nothing, or rather could not find the place in himself where feeling should be. But he couldn’t say this. It was too strange and difficult to make sense of this state he was in.
In the hospital there had been the other men, the ones who knew the Front, had seen the same sights, the commonplace horror, the things impossible to describe – or perhaps possible if anyone ever asked, which they did not. They avoided the subject as if it was personal and embarrassing. It was too far from them. Back here he was supposed to put it behind him, to forget: he protecting them and they him. Here at home, he reverted to the state of a child, sitting for hours at a time in the back room, watching thin winter sunlight etch the bright, distorted shape of the window on the carpet. His mother brought him food on invalid trays. She would come and sit opposite him with her own dinner balanced on her knee, and he learned, watching her hold her knife and fork, that her knuckles had begun to swell and she told him they ached. She looked much older than when he’d left, her hair steely grey, the white catching the sun from the window. She talked about the neighbours, snippets of amusing or reassuring – never bad – news. In the evening his father came home. Sometimes they went down to the pub together where Ned went through the motions of talking to people, being modest when they called him a hero because of his medal, being cheerful and grateful to be alive. He
was
grateful – of course he was. He was also thankful for their affection but he could barely breathe at home. He knew he had to get away.
The pressure they put on him was gentle at first. It started in the hospital, after the delirious days of fever had passed and he was cooler, weak, but able to talk.
‘We thought, in a day or two, Mary could come in and see you,’ his mother said.
Ned looked into her face. At that moment he didn’t care who came. ‘What good will that do?’
‘Well – she wants to see you. I don’t think they’ll let Ruth in here, but all in good time. It’ll give you two a chance to have a talk together, won’t it?’
‘But Mom—’
‘She wants to see yer.’ In a sterner voice she added, ‘She’s your wife, Ned. Of course she’s going to visit yer.’
He had started to cry.
‘There, there.’ His mother kept patting his arm. ‘Oh dear, never mind, love, never mind. Least said soonest mended.’ She interpreted his tears as those of remorse. They had decided to act as if Ned’s behaviour before he went away had been a few weeks of madness, an aberration so offensive to their respectable social standards that they could ignore it and treat him as if it had never happened. They wanted their son back from years before: a good lad, biddable, settled.
Jess’s visit now seemed like a kind of dream. Her lips on his cheek, her face . . . One small crack which had opened in him, letting emotion crowd through. But now that too was distant from him. He couldn’t seem to rouse any emotion towards any of them.
Mary came dressed sweetly in a sea-blue skirt gathered at the waist, a white blouse with an Eton collar tucked over her navy coat. She was still painfully thin and obviously very tired. Ned saw how much she was coming to look like her mother.
‘Hello, Ned.’ She tried, uncertainly, to smile as she sat beside him. He realized as he answered, that she was fighting tears, but she won against them, looking down for a moment, controlling herself.
‘How are yer – the leg and that?’
‘Oh – coming along, you know. I weren’t myself for a while I think.’ He tried to move the leg and clenched his teeth at the pain which shot through his thigh. ‘But they say it’ll be awright.’
There was a long silence, before he remembered to say,
‘And how’re you?’
‘We’re getting on awright,’ she spoke carefully. Everyone seemed in a conspiracy to spare him any feeling, to pretend everything in life was smooth and quietly contented.
‘You wouldn’t know Ruth now,’ she said. ‘She’s ever so pretty. Got your eyes. I’d’ve liked to bring ’er in but they don’t want children in ’ere. She’ll be four before long.’
Ned nodded. ‘Yes. I know.’ He licked his dry lips.
‘Would yer like to see ’er?’ There was a tremor in her voice.
‘Yes, awright,’ he agreed, dismissively. ‘Mary?’ He looked into her face.
Mary kept her expression calm. ‘What is it?’
‘I’m sorry.’ He knew he should be sorry, that he
was
sorry. He had the memory of sorrow and knew it was for her. ‘What I did . . . you and Ruth. It was terrible . . .’
Tears welled in her eyes again. ‘Yes it was.’ She pulled out a handkerchief. ‘It bloody was, Ned.’ She sat waiting for him to say more.
‘I don’t know—’ he hesitated. ‘I don’t know what else to say to yer.’
She shook her head, wiping her eyes. ‘One minute you was there – Ruth’s dad, my ’usband. And the next you’d just gone – with
her
. . .’
She was really crying now, unable to control it. ‘I wanted you to die,’ she said bitterly, through her tears. ‘For what you’d done to us. I thought if I couldn’t have you then neither would she. How
could
you’ve done it?’ She clasped her handkerchief over her mouth for a second. ‘Oh – I said I wouldn’t . . .’
‘It’s awright – I deserve it,’ he said dully. He watched her, trying to enter into the situation. It must be because I love Jess, he thought. I can’t pity Mary as much as I should.
In a short time she stood up. ‘I’ll come again. Let you know ’ow Ruth’s getting on. I’ll bring a picture of ’er.’
As she left he turned his head away, exhausted, and closed his eyes. As soon as he did so the ward vanished and he was back there, as ever among the dead, standing completely alone, it seemed, heat hammering down on him. The only sound he was aware of was the roar of thousands of flies moving over the scorched waste of No Man’s Land.
Mary walked out to catch a tram on the Dudley Road, back to her mother’s house where she had lived with Ruth for the past three years. As Ned’s wife she had received her share of his army pay, but it had made no sense to rent two houses next door to each other and she could barely afford it anyway.
When Ned left she had felt disbelief for a long time, then anger and jealousy. If she thought back now to that time, to what she had suffered, she could still get herself worked up into an almost hysterical state of bitter fury. But after three years of bringing up Ruth on her own, yet being also back in the position of child in her mother’s house, her emotions now included a shrewdness towards the practicalities of life.
I don’t want to spend the rest of my days like this, she thought. I’ve got the worst of all worlds. I want a house of my own and a husband. She knew that Ned’s mom and dad had always been on her side when he left, and when he came home, injured, it was they who told her of it and suggested she should be beside him in his weak state to tell him how his little daughter missed him.
‘Take it slowly,’ Mrs Green said. ‘’E’s been ever so poorly since ’e’s been in hospital. But if you’re prepared to make a fresh start with him, now’s yer chance. Be gentle with ’im and I reckon you’ll soon win him back.’
I was gentle enough, she thought. Gentle as I could be, when I think of some of the things I might’ve said to him! And I’ll be back, so he’ll have to get used to me. Seeing him lying there helpless, she knew she could still feel for him, despite the hurt he had inflicted on her. He’s still mine – my husband, the only one I’m likely to get now. I want him back and I’m going to see I get him!
Every week throughout the winter, Mary travelled out to visit him in the convalescent home. She brought in photographs of Ruth, with her hair waving round her mischievous little face. He smiled when he saw them, a little uncertainly, but when she said,
‘She’s a lovely little thing,’ Ned agreed, yes she was. She talked lightly to him, getting him used to her being there, herself getting used to him again, told him about what Ruth had been doing, things she’d got up to as a baby, and as an older child, toddling around. She told him news of her mom, the family, as if he was still part of it, and he seemed to listen with interest, pleasure sometimes. She was, she thought, being as saintly and patient as it was possible to be, in the circumstances. She knew Jess had been to see his family, had been told to keep away. So she, Mary, was the one with a chance. He would come to his senses and come back to her.
As the weeks passed though, she began to get impatient. It would take time, she knew, but as 1917 turned into 1918 and she was still visiting Ned in the convalescent home, nothing seemed to change. He smiled when he saw her, listened to her, talked a little about his injury, the ward routine, all little everyday things. But never did he show the emotions she’d hoped for, the remorse, the begging her for forgiveness and asking for her to have him back. And she was afraid to ask, for fear of his reply. She was in fear of him, a little, for all that he was wrong, because he had the power to hurt her so badly. At least though, she thought, he’s not turning me away. He’s used to me being around.
Soon after he came out of the home and was at his parents’ she went to see him. She found him sitting bent over the table in the back sitting room, writing. He looked different. He had been to the barber’s and his hair, which had grown in hospital, was now cropped short again. Startled, she realized it was the first time she had seen him fully dressed since his return and suddenly felt intimidated. Before, sitting there in pyjamas, he had been defenceless like a child. She’d stood over him and been able to pity him. Now he was fully a man again: tall, stronger, a soldier, the man who, in spite of his dutiful nature, had felt such overwhelming desire for another woman that he had left her, his wife.
He turned as she came in and she saw him swiftly close the pad of paper he was writing on and arrange a smile for her on his face.
‘So – yer out,’ she said, stupidly. She felt gawky and awkward, like a young girl asking to be wooed.
‘Yes.’
‘That’s – well – it’s good, ain’t it?’
His hand was spread on the writing pad as if he was afraid of her looking into it.
‘I’ve brought someone to see yer,’ Mary said softly. She stepped out into the hall where Mrs Green was holding Ruth’s hand. She was squatting down with her finger pressed to her lips and Ruth was copying her game of being quiet, keeping her presence there a surprise.
Ned’s mom led the little girl into the room.
‘Now, love – this big man here is
my
little boy – yes, he is! And you won’t remember him because he’s been away fighting in the war. But this is your Daddy, Ruth.’ Eyes on Ned’s face, she led the child over. ‘Come and say hello to Daddy.’
Ruth came over to him, led by Mary, one finger in her mouth, walking with a child’s shy, dragging steps until she was right up close. She was a leggy child with wide grey eyes and thick, wavy hair cut level with her chin. Ned thought of the night she was born, remembered that he had had strong, protective feelings towards her and Mary and he tried to summon them up in himself now.
He told himself he should smile at her, and commanded the muscles of his face to bend for him. The smile was achieved and now he knew everyone was waiting for him to speak. Ruth was standing, wide-eyed, at his knee.
‘Hello, Ruth.’ She rocked slightly from side to side, body half-rotating, feet planted firmly, plucking at the back of her skirt with the other hand.
She removed the finger and said, ‘’Ullo.’
Suddenly he could no longer stand the child’s stare, the naked enquiry in her eyes. Unlike the others she was not careful with him, not in a conspiracy to keep him calm. She gazed right into him, looking for a father, wanting to know from him the meaning of ‘father’.
