The Heroes' Welcome (20 page)

This Riley had not expected. He didn’t want it, that he knew. Could he refuse? His mind raced. No. Or yes? Was he allowed to say he’d think about it?

He sat silent.

‘I hope you’ll allow it,’ Sir Robert said. ‘I think it’s a very likely investment.’

He means he doesn’t think it is at all. He doesn’t believe in me. He’s putting out a safety net to protect Nadine, and to allow me a little time before I cock it all up.

‘Robert,’ he said. ‘I’m touched and honoured.’ He hated lying. This was unpleasant.

A light knock, and the door pushed open: Nadine. She was smiling and looked questioningly at them.

She knows about this. They’ve planned it.

Solicitous and loving, she said: ‘Isn’t it a wonderful idea, darling?’

Which it is
…

You’d think a fellow had a right to decide about his own investors … but no.

Riley could see perfectly well that a shot of financial back-up at this early stage would be extremely useful: the initial pamphlet had gone down very well, so he and Hinchcliffe had quickly put out another two, and had new ones in the pipeline. But damn it, he hadn’t even been going to take money from Major Gillies. He would accept no money, no investment, that smelt of sympathy, war shame, or guilt. Not a penny. He was a man like any other and would make a living and build a business like anyone else. Enough of being given everything on a bloody plate and being denied the opportunity to prove himself.

So, everybody thinks it’s a splendid idea, except for your pride.

Ha!

Of course a business needed investment. He would be happy to accept investment from men who had served. Or widows. Or nurses and VADs. Ambulance drivers, orderlies, chaplains, drivers of ambulance trains, etc. because 1) it would make him work all the harder to make them a decent dividend and 2) they didn’t need to pity him, because they had their own sorrows.

So is Jacqueline’s death not a sorrow?

Yes, of course it is.

Riley, you’re tying yourself in circles! Your logic is self-punishing! Your logic, face it, is not logic.

He accepted the money – as a loan, not an investment. (Sir Robert, who hardly knew the difference between the two, was happy with that.) What he intended to achieve was more important than his pride.
Bite the bullet, lad.
Riley put Hinchcliffe on a salary and came to an agreement with Owen the printer. He came to an agreement with himself, too: he would pay his father-in-law back within three years. By which time he also planned to be paying the household bills, and with luck buying out the lease on the house on Bayswater Road.

*

‘You’re practically a publishing empire,’ Hinchcliffe said, the lunchtime Riley offered him a salary, in the Leinster Arms.

That was good to hear. Yes, he could build an empire.

‘We,’ he said, and Hinchcliffe looked pleased, but Riley was a little tired. ‘I’m not going to go out talking to everyone,’ he said. ‘You can do that. What do you think?’

‘I think yes,’ said Hinchcliffe.

‘And we’d better get someone to answer the phone. A wounded man.’

Hinchcliffe agreed. (Riley took on a perky and remarkably agile Cockney boy with a wooden Anglesey leg, the younger brother of one of Gillies’ patients. ‘He can run errands,’ Riley said. Hinchcliffe didn’t dare say a word.)

‘Let’s think up some new ideas then …’ – but they were hardly short. Everywhere he looked, Riley saw mental, emotional and intellectual hunger. No one knew what would emerge from the chaos, and people wanted to be both prepared and reassured.
The end of civilisation, the collapse of all that we once knew, whither this, and what about that …
the Peace, the Armenians, religion, Communism, Ireland, jazz, unemployment, girls putting on lipstick in public. Civilians, in particular, seemed bothered with these issues. Riley, having looked death in the mouth many many times, was a secure man – secure in the knowledge that he was going to die, and so was everyone else, that human life was a vale of tears, and that consciously or willingly adding to the world’s harvest of fear and misery was a waste, a waste, of the nebulous glorious moments one might be able to snatch along the road. Not that he judged. He knew how it felt to come out of danger into relative safety, and to burst into tears and piss yourself with relief. He saw the world around him doing this. It’s what Peter was doing. Even Julia perhaps, with her bolt to Biarritz.

He had spent a long afternoon in a café in Amiens with Peter telling him about the Spartan Army and their techniques. Esoteric harmony: how to release fear from your muscles, from your face, from your soul. Exoteric harmony: how to be united with your brother warriors like limbs on a beast, fingers on a hand. The Shedding: part of the training in phobologia – the knowledge of fear. After a battle, the Spartan warriors would go somewhere – Riley had imagined them standing around in fields, knee-deep in the dead and blood-stained asphodels, greaves and breastplates glinting in evening sun – and they would shake and weep, releasing the tension, the adrenalin, the fury, the ice-cold control that kept them invincible in the fight. And when that was done – a respected part of the process of battle, something necessary – they would come back and proceed with their lives. It was not only the soldiers, now, but the whole country, the whole world perhaps, that was shaking, after what it had been through. Phobos was a creature of many forms. And Riley knew all about that. So he addressed it.

The approach was practical. From the initial pamphlets for autodidacts and the lost and confused, the Orme Press planned to move on to pamphlets of policy and ideals, written by intellectuals and those with experience of their field. Robert Waveney was writing them a treatise on the power of music, practical and emotional, to raise the spirits and motivate the low. This had already attracted the attention of the Horrabins, who Riley hoped would agree to write something. They might even get the Coles, even H.G. Wells …

‘How about improving memoirs, for men and women?’ said Hinchcliffe.

‘Yes. Let’s find some. And – crime stories.’ Riley said. ‘The modern ones. Of the rather lurid, tersely written and very profitable type. Bitter old soldier turns detective kind of thing.’

Hinchcliffe expressed his surprise.

‘They will fit in perfectly,’ Riley said. ‘All our publications will tend to peace and social justice, and crime stories are also about righting wrongs and understanding human nature. There’s too many soldiers going to the bad.’ He wondered for a second where Johnno-the-Thief Burgess was. Probably gone back to going to the bad. Perhaps he’d look him out. Perhaps not.

‘But who will write them?’ Hinchcliffe was saying.

‘You,’ said Riley, and Hinchcliffe snorted. But Riley knew he’d like the idea.

No conversation with Riley could be very long. He had come to recognise the little tensions in his cheek muscles and a certain strain on the tongue that told him he was talking too much. When he stopped talking, he just stopped. He didn’t notice that that was how he did it, and that it might be seen as rude. It didn’t matter. He only talked to who he wanted to anyway, and his grey-diamond eyes still spoke clearly to anybody who cared to listen.

Hinchcliffe, tapping his fingers on the dimples of his pint mug, said, ‘By the way, you know Owen has sacked Ermleigh?’

‘No. Why?’

‘I gather because he wants someone who can work harder.’

Riley closed his eyes and bit the insides of his peculiar cheeks. ‘Come on then,’ he said, and stood up.

*

At Owen’s, Riley stood slightly too close to the man and said to him with great clarity, ‘Mr Owen. Now, we’ve been to the pub together, haven’t we? We’re on the same side? So – how’s your German?’

‘Sorry, Purefoy, I don’t …’

‘Without men like Ermleigh, you’d be printing umlauts, Mr Owen. Do you have umlauts in your printstock?’

‘I, er …’

‘You should get some in. I’m planning a series – “My Life as a Hun”, by some ordinary German boys – their side of the story. How being thrown into the pit of hell by a German government differs from being thrown into the pit of hell by a British one. Only war isn’t hell, is it? It’s worse. Because hell is just for sinners, but war gets everybody, no matter how innocent. And then some of us come out of it worse off than others. Probably even harder to feed your family in Hamburg or Berlin at the moment than it is here, I should imagine. Not asking you to sympathise with the Hun, Mr Owen. But you might consider the position of the Tommy.’

‘Well, Captain—’

‘Put Ermleigh back, Mr Owen, or our business goes elsewhere.’

God, this is so easy to do. No skin off my nose. (
And he caught himself for a moment. He’d used that phrase to Jarvis once, during the phase when the bridge – or what was to be the bridge – of Jarvis’ new nose had been carrying a delicate little horsehair stitch, crimping it in place so at least the great sausage was narrower at the top than at the bottom …
wonder where Jarvis is now. Find him.
)

‘But Captain Purefoy—’

‘Mr Owen. With the Empire collapsing, we’re just a clever little country. That’s all. But we are meant to have standards. In theory – in principle, we have principles.’

‘But—’

Riley said, ‘I am never going to do the wrong thing again, Mr Owen. Do you understand?’

He said it quite gently. The red mist of fighting was not far away at all. Just below the surface. But this anger was sleek. He could feel it in his eyes.

Owen understood.

Walking back, Hinchcliffe beside him, Riley shed it. Rolled his shoulders and threw off ripples of anger to let his calm return. Hinchcliffe was silent all the way.

Riley was thinking:
It seems to me that once you’ve been damaged, if you don’t become a healer you just get … more damaged. You need to be able to envisage a future. To acknowledge how scared you are, and yet carry on, and help.

After a while, Hinchcliffe said: ‘So, um, Purefoy. Are you going to sack me for not being wounded?’

‘Oh, you’re wounded all right,’ Riley said.
One-and-three-quarter million wounded, and that’s just the wounds you can see.
‘You got your heart broken.’

*

Coming back to his father-in-law’s house that night, Riley fancied a cup of tea. The coat rack in the hall was, as usual, full: Sir Robert’s smart velvet-collared cashmere, his raincoat and his walking coat, Nadine’s new blue cape, her light coat and her tweed, plus several things of Jacqueline’s that had escaped the clear-out to the dress agency. Riley didn’t like to move anything, but when his own coat slipped off the mound of cloth for lack of any kind of purchase, he felt a low fury.

He didn’t know how to live here. At home, as a child, he had his own hook and there was only one coat each anyway, and he’d make his own tea, or his mum would. In the trenches you didn’t take your coat off, and if you did you were asleep under it, and the tea came round in its billy when it wanted. In the hospital you didn’t have a coat, or tea, unless someone thought you should, in which case they’d bring it. But here? No room for your coat, and tea involved ringing a bell, waiting for someone to come and ask what you want, then go away and make it and bring it to you. And no one expected you to want tea when you came in in the evening. You were meant to want sherry. (And then you didn’t have your actual tea till eight, and they called it dinner, and your actual dinner they called lunch. Well, he was used to all that.) Several times he’d found himself going round to Sir Alfred’s instead. Being a straightforward guest and being straightforwardly offered a cup of tea by Mrs Briggs who had loved him since he was a boy was easier than this half-guest half-family position in his father-in-law’s home. Or his wife’s dead mother-in-law’s home. Or the home of the girl his wife used to be.

‘Remember when we were going to live in Chelsea?’ he said to Nadine, later that evening. ‘Our two little rooms, and you were going to study art?’

‘Remember when I was going to get a motorbike and ride around the world with you on the back?’ she replied, with a smile.

Is living in Chelsea that ambitious?
he thought.
Oh.

‘I’d like to live in Chelsea,’ he said.

‘But we live here,’ she said carefully. ‘Don’t we?’

‘We
could
move,’ he said.

‘Why?’ she asked. He looked around the pretty room; glanced out the windows towards Kensington Gardens, wide, leafy and dim across the road.
Because of my pride, and my lack of ease here, because I want our home to be our own home. Is that selfish? Probably.

He thought of another tack.

‘Shall we get a little place in the country?’

She said, ‘I can’t think we could afford it.’

‘In a few years?’ he said.

‘Thinking ahead!’ she said, and she smiled.

It’s just teething troubles
,
he thought
. Settling.

‘I ran into your mother,’ Nadine said, with a little smile. ‘Almost literally.’ She waited to see what he’d make of that.
What do I make of that?

‘Oh,’ he said. ‘How is she?’

‘She’s well. I went back for tea. Elen was there. Don’t look so surprised! We’re family.’

He hadn’t thought of it quite that way. But – he glanced at her suspiciously. She looked happy enough about it.
Hm.

‘I told them to pop in any time,’ she went on, ‘but I’m not sure they will. Perhaps a more formal invitation, just to make things easier … in a month or two. Perhaps around Christmas. Boxing Day lunch or something. They know about my mother …’

Hmm.

She was looking at him.

Family.

*

He went round a few days later, braving the possibility that Elen would be no less withering now than she had been on his first visit. Being withered by Elen he could do without. But as it happened, he was just in time to learn that Elen was getting married. Her man friend was called Gavin, a ticket inspector on the Great Western. He was Welsh (Mum was over the moon about that). No war – asthma. He seemed all right. Jokes were made.