by Louisa Young
Really? asked a little voice. What, leave her be to marry someone of her own sort? Get yourself killed so she never has to face the fact that prole and posh ne’er the twain shall meet, what with the rich girl being in her pretty Georgian villa and the poor man at the gate of the park across the road, staring up in his war-granted finery, bought with the blood of the men who died.
Riley stared that stream of thought down, stopped it, picked it up by the tail like a dead rat and dropped it in the forbidden zone of his mind, alongside First Ypres, Second Ypres, the spiralling death of Captain Harper, whose face he could no longer recall, and a few other things. Just shut up.
God, so many things he can’t think of …
It was Sunday. Would he go to the Waveneys’ first, or to his mum’s? He pushed himself to his feet and walked on under the spreading trees, tiny green buds sprouting along the black branches, brown shiny sticky-buds erupting with pale, feathery claws. At the park’s iron gates he paused, looking out across Bayswater Road. He glanced over at Sir James Barrie’s house, next door on the corner, and thought about Nadine telling him the story of Peter Pan, and about the first time he had met Sir James in the Waveneys’ drawing room, and been surprised that he had no armour or sword and was just a funny-looking little Scotsman. And how he had been glad that Sir James did not speak in the same quick, clipped yet somehow drawling voice that everybody else in the Waveney house had. Except Barnes, of course, and Mrs Barnes, who glared at him as if he were a cuckoo. An armed cuckoo. An armed anarchist Communist cuckoo with a swag bag and a stripy shirt. Oh, Mrs Barnes, how are you now?
As Riley walked up the short path and knocked on the door, he felt a sudden sharp yank of nerves at his insides.
Barnes opened it. ‘You!’ he said, and clocked Riley’s height, his uniform, and the badge on his sleeve. A little battle of emotions passed over his face. ‘I’ve signed up, you know,’ he said, a little defensively.
‘I’ll see you out there,’ said Riley, with half a smile, as he slipped into the hall. Barnes took his cap and his case. ‘Are they in?’
‘Mrs Waveney’s in the drawing room, sir,’ said Barnes, and Riley felt the man’s little wince of surprise at finding himself calling Riley ‘sir’.
When Mrs Waveney turned from the fireplace to greet him he was for a moment floored by her beauty. She was clean. Her hair was coiffed and lovely. She was so very smooth and female. And like her daughter.
Second Lieutenant Purefoy pulled himself up. Mrs Waveney was formal with him, he noticed immediately. Not cold – just uncomfortable. He recalled what Nadine had written: it was as if the free-and-easy, self-indulgent self she had allowed herself to be before the war no longer fitted her, and she did not know what else to wear, in these straitened times. She enquired after his health, and seemed nervous. It was strange to him, after all those years of warm – illogically warm, looking back on it – welcome he had had from this family, all the generosity, the vast amount he owed them. Riley had no idea what Mrs Waveney saw when she looked at him. He thought perhaps she was angry. The sudden going, his nasty valedictory comment, the equally sudden return – she had a right to be angry. Or she might be embarrassed, knowing that he knew she had tried to separate Nadine from him. Or sad, even, to have lost the rather sweet relationship they used to have, the loving respect of the boy he used to be.
Valid though these points were, none of them, in fact, informed her current expression.
She had last seen a grateful, hard-working boy who knew his own good fortune, a pet, a safe little thing only just beginning to outgrow the nice slot they’d so kindly and carelessly given him. The last thing he’d said to her, ‘If you’re lucky, I’ll get killed’, had been childish and cruel but understandable, under the circumstances.
Now, two years later, she saw something so very different: an officer, a tough, broad-shouldered young man with a thin slice of scar on one high cheekbone, and a wound stripe; a battle-hardened warrior, a hero of the Western Front, the human sacrifice for all of them, and up to here with what people were beginning to call Sex Appeal.
She’d taught him his alphabet, for goodness’ sake, and even she …
My God, she thought, is Riley Purefoy to be something after all?
No. It’s just war glamour.
It was late, but she offered him tea.
‘How is Mr – er … Waveney?’ Riley enquired. Am I flustering her? The thought of it made him smile, and the smile looked a little cruel to her, and that flustered her more.
‘Mr Waveney is well,’ she said, and she glanced at his sleeve. ‘He’s very involved, you know, with the Patriotic Concerts at the Albert Hall. They’re raising lots of money! A great success …’
Am I to be embarrassed about being an officer on active service, when he isn’t? Riley thought. Well, I’m not.
‘Congratulations,’ she said. ‘I’m not surprised at all.’ And for a moment the old warmth was there. He held her gaze steadily, saying nothing, half the smile still at the corner of his mouth.
It is extremely important, Jacqueline realised, that Nadine does not see him.
‘And Nadine?’ he said.
Where did he get that tone of authority?
‘Nadine’s not here,’ she said.
He waited.
‘She’s at the hospital.’ Let’s hope he doesn’t know which one.
‘When is her time off?’ he said.
Jacqueline gave a little laugh. ‘Well, we never know, really, it’s all terribly irregular … ’
The message was clear in her apologetic tone.
He watched her. So beautiful. So like her daughter.
*
He hadn’t told her he was coming. He hadn’t known he was coming. He hadn’t known what he could say, to what he could invite her. The fits and starts with which they half declared themselves in letters … He had not seen her in two years. Since they were children.
I should go on to Mum and Dad’s, he thought. Give the girls their presents. I should go on to Sir Alfred’s.
He waited outside, standing on the Bayswater Road outside Sir James Barrie’s house – was he in there, in the firelight flickering behind the curtains? He and his boy who would never grow up? An image glanced by: boys he had seen who would never grow up, flying, landing on the wire, bits of them—
It’s only an idea, a memory. It’s not a hallucination. Just a memory. Can’t be avoided, can’t hurt. You’re still sane, Purefoy. Look how beautiful the green lawns of the park are in the misty evening light, unmuddied, smooth, alive, no holes, no bodies, no barbed wire, no explosions. Such a simple thing to be grateful for. No wrongness. Can no wrongness be enough to make rightness?
God, no wrongness. No wrongness would be fucking marvellous.
He had been told that at times of particularly heavy barrage the guns could be heard in London. He had been told that picnics on the South Downs had been silenced by the distant echoing, and that sometimes, at night, you could look out of your window in Kent, across that tiny little arm of water, and see the burnt glow of the long and random wound not far away. It seemed wrong for him, a soldier, to know this. Under the unwritten, unspoken laws of the great mute conspiracy that all of this was all right and not against the laws of nature, certain things had to be not known. Soldiers, for instance, did not mention over tea at home the corpses of young boys floating down flooded trenches, half eaten by rats. Equivalently, those at home should not be telling those of us Over There that they can hear the guns and see the Zeppelins burning. Because if England is not calm and golden and peaceful, what are we fighting for?
He stared up the road, and down.
She came, in the end, from the bus stop. He turned and saw her because he noticed the suddenness of her stopping when she saw him, thought it was him, thought it couldn’t be. They looked at each other for a long moment, across the road. A bus passed between them (double decker, Marmite advertisement on the side) and their eyes were still linked as it went on by.
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Finally he threw himself across the road. The most astounding effort of will stopped him folding his arms, his coat, his body, his legs, his heart around her. He could feel her quivering as he stood an electric two feet away from her.
‘Hello,’ he said. He took his hat off. Put it on again.
‘Hello,’ she said.
‘How are you?’ he said politely, and she started laughing, so he said, ‘Shall we walk?’
She nodded. His curls were shorn and his neck was strong. He was taller. He was a soldier.
They went in through the gate to the park.
He took her hand, and a layer of tension shook itself off him in a great shiver. They walked to the Round Pond, of course, because that was where the path led. There was no one there, just water-birds in soft piles, roosting. The evening had turned damp and melting, cold, insidious, dreamy. Each of them thought only of the warmth and solidity of the other’s hand, the presence of it, the solidity.
‘How have you been?’ he murmured, after a while.
‘Cold and lonely,’ she said, with a little laugh.
They walked on.
‘Well,’ said Riley.
Then, ‘How have you been?’ she said.
‘In Hell,’ he replied. Their steps matched, muffled, as they turned towards the Broad Walk. ‘Only we’re not allowed to say.’
They walked.
Warm hands.
‘Who would have thought,’ she said, ‘that this is what we would be?’
He suddenly recalled a postcard he had received as a child, from a friend whose family had gone to Canada: ‘I am six now. Are you any older?’
He smiled, looking down. They walked on.
‘Cup of tea?’ he said. ‘Lyons? Or have you turned into one of those beer-drinking war girls? Do you need a sharp one at the Ram? Or a pink gin at the Kensington Close?’
She laughed a little. ‘Cup of tea,’ she said, and began to cry.
‘So what kind of war girl are you, Nadine?’ he asked her, sitting at a table with a thick white cup each and two buns, the window steaming up behind him, the mirror glittering behind her so he could see how completely gorgeous she was from two angles.
‘Don’t you know?’ she said.
Their eyebeams were twisting.
‘Not a beer-drinking VAD of loose morals … not a saucy munitionette with yellow cheeks and a boyfriend heading for management … You don’t look the kind to lift morphine and cocaine from the stores and flog it to shell-shocked soldiers in nightclubs …’
‘They do that in France too, do they?’ she said.
‘All the time. The streets are running with them. Glorious women in uniform, dripping with stolen omnipom and ration packs, heading for the highlife in Paris … There are some clubs, the smartest of all, where you can’t even get in without a red cross on your sleeve and a Poiret evening bag packed with menthol snuff …’
‘What do you know about Poiret?’ She laughed. ‘What on earth is going on out there? I thought there was a war on.’
‘Oh, we have our amateur theatricals. Private Johnson is a lady most of the time. Even the colonels kiss his hand. Sorry, her hand. I don’t want to talk about there. Talk about you. What war girl are you, if you’re not a drug-runner?’
‘Oh, I’m much more mundane,’ she said. Her hair was fluffing up in the steam.
He raised his eyebrows at her. ‘Tell me,’ he said, and the request was so simple it blind-sided her, and she couldn’t not.
‘I’m the girl who tends every soldier as if he were one soldier in particular, and thinks all the time of French or Belgian girls who at that very moment might be tending him,’ she said, and stopped as suddenly as she had started. She found she was holding her face very tight because actually, as she had realised halfway through, did she have any right to say this to him?
She stared at him. Stared at his scar. His beautiful grey eyes, sparkly half-moons when he grins, really sparkly, like diamonds. He’s not smiling now … What has he been through? What has he done?
He was looking at the table, stirring his tea. He tasted it, and put in a little more sugar. Then he put his hand over his mouth for a second, and then he took out a cigarette and tapped it.
Does she mean …?
He couldn’t assume. Time had passed. They were not children any more. Had her life raced on – after all, why shouldn’t it? Are you any older?
One touch, for God’s sake. For two years he’d been faithful to one touch of her waist. Almost faithful. Emotionally faithful. He looked at her hand on the table. He couldn’t assume.
I am capable of bravery. He smiled to himself. ‘So who’s the lucky fellow?’ he blurted, grinning stupidly, and dropping his teaspoon.
Her mouth fell open. She’d told him, and he hadn’t heard. Or had he heard all too well – was he sparing her? ‘Riley,’ she said.
‘Mmm?’
Her face was stricken.
‘Riley, don’t be a complete idiot,’ she said. ‘We don’t have long.’
‘Of course … your mother …’
‘I couldn’t care less about my mother,’ she said. ‘Your leave is not very long. I am working all hours at the hospital. I want to make your every moment here … perfect, so that you know what you’re missing and you don’t forget and you don’t lose faith and you come back. Remember, you asked me to be there to pull you—’
‘I love you,’ he interrupted, and was astonished to find the words on his lips, in the air, on their way to her.
She lifted her chin, gave him a sideways look. What was the look? Surprise? No – wariness? Perhaps. Distrust? No. Ah – no. It was – aha!
‘I love you,’ he said. ‘I always have done. I always will. Nothing to offer, not a chance your family would accept me, even if you—’
‘I do,’ she said.
‘Do you?’
‘You know perfectly well.’
They looked at each in silence. Then Riley stood, and moved round the table, and sat down again, next to her. Their sleeves touched, the length of their upper arms. They sat like that for a moment. Then he breathed out, long and slow, and turned his head slightly so that her wild Mesopotamian hair was just there, touching his cheek.
The nippy was coughing. Her face was indulgent, though. Soldier and his gal in a romantic dream! She wished she had a handsome officer to lean her head against. All right for some …
Riley started, and ordered more tea and more buns. Nadine blushed very slightly. He wanted to mention that she was blushing, so she would blush more. He wanted – oh, God, what he wanted.
He was incredibly happy to find that he wanted. He had been afraid that he wouldn’t want again.
He stuffed himself with a bun instead. For the moment.
She felt the need to change the subject. More talk of love would lead to the difficulties surrounding … Oh, God, he loved her, he did, she did, they did, it was.
It was.
She was smiling like a fool, glowing.
His beautiful face, which she would kiss. Fury that someone, someone they didn’t even know, had damaged his beautiful face, given him that little scar. Proud of his courage. He’s a man, she thought, and the very word gave her a frisson, a lurch inside.
‘How did you get that?’ she said quickly.
‘Shrapnel,’ he said.
‘Is that why you were promoted?’ she asked. ‘Were you terribly brave?’
‘It’s what happens,’ he said brusquely. Damn I’m being just how they are – I’m doing what I don’t want to do. Stiff upper lip, don’t alarm our people at home—
‘So are you a gentleman now?’ It just leapt out. Stupid thing to say! But he laughed.
‘Mmm, yes. Gentleman Second Lieutenant with nothing extra behind him. It occurred to me it might be one of the advantages. Along with the servant and the extra socks and two leaves a year and evening shift at the brothel – oh, God, Nadine, I’m so—’
She was smiling painfully. ‘Really?’ she s
aid. ‘And is that something you terribly need to tell me about?’
‘It – oh, Nadine. Soldier talk. I’m sorry. I’m not fit for decent company – I’ve never used the brothels – oh, God, I shouldn’t even be—’
‘Riley,’ she said, ‘I work in a hospital. I know about these things now.’
He blinked. He didn’t want her knowing about these things. He wanted her … What? Pure and happy and symbolic? Grow up, Purefoy.
‘Girls do now,’ she said.
‘Oh,’ he said.
‘Why?’ she said. ‘If you’ve never – have you never? Riley, you’re a man, have you …? Never?’
It was inconceivable, this conversation. His parents would never have talked of these things, even after twenty years of marriage. He didn’t think hers would have either. And neither would he and Nadine, had it not been for the It, the great It, which had metamorphosed girl and boy into Nurse and Soldier, Nurse and Soldier. What might they have been, if …?
No ifs.
And now she was asking him …
‘No – I have. I have.’
‘You have.’
‘I … have.’
‘What was it, then?’
‘It – what, the circumstances? Or the – doing?’
‘Both,’ she said, and she tried to smile, and her beauty radiated through him, so that for a second his blood fled and he wanted her so much, to fold her in his arms, to love her and do all the unspeakable things to her, so much, that he had to close his eyes for a moment.
‘Circumstances,’ he said. ‘Right.’ Dear God, am I really telling her this? ‘Not a brothel. Billet, farm family, little kids, fat old mum, dad at the front. Um …’ Dear God, yes, I am. ‘The eldest daughter. Soldier’s widow, name of Mireille, very sweet …’
He looked up at her. Fuck, I should have lied. ‘… came and sat on my bunk one night and asked me.’ I should have lied. ‘Er … Physical incident. A thing bodies do, very nice – sweet girl. Affection, I suppose.
Ah – warmth. Not a lot to it. Not a bad thing …’ till now ‘… not the greatest sin of all time. Can’t see God minding that much, what with everything else He’s letting go on … Only regret is …’
He couldn’t say it. There are limits.