by Louisa Young
He came on the line.
‘Hello, Major Locke, my name is Nadine Waveney.’
A pause.
‘I am a friend of your cousin Rose.’ She liked saying that. They were friends.
‘No, you’re not,’ he said. ‘You’re Riley Purefoy’s girl.’
She dropped the telephone. Almost squawked. The joy, the bittersweet joy, of hearing herself described so.
She picked it up again. ‘Hello?’ she said.
‘Hello,’ he said. ‘So sorry, that didn’t come out quite right. Um. Friend of Rose’s?’
‘I’m here in Paris,’ she said. ‘I’ve been at Étaples. Rose suggested I look you up.’
‘Well, find a cab and come over. We’ll have lunch – take the cab on. Good,’ he said, and hung up.
*
The brasserie was curled and mirrored, white-linened and clean-glassed. Shining dark wood panels, cool grey marble table-tops. Everything was so solid. The air was drunk with the smell of garlic in melting butter. Waiters burst through doors, pushing them open with a hip, carrying ice-piled platters of oysters and mussels and crevettes gris and little langoustines, their frondlike extremities fanned as if they were still underwater. Beautiful women slunk around in fur coats. Officers smoked cigars and drank. Chicken was two francs a plate. There was chicken. Nadine could not quite believe that such parallel universes lived alongside each other, so close, so far.
Major Locke was tall and blond and stooped, gentle, courteous. ‘Let’s have champagne,’ he said. ‘You probably deserve it. I’m sure you do.’ It was not his first drink of the day.
My God, what a girl. Not obvious in any way, but plenty of SA there.
Nadine drank three beautiful wide glasses of bittersweet champagne, very quickly. So cold. So beautiful.
Locke watched her. ‘You look like you need a meal,’ he said. ‘What will you have?’
‘Steak,’ she said. ‘Rare.’
‘And to start?’
‘Sole meunière.’ At the next table, a group of glamorous people were arguing about classicalism and romanticism. An abbé was saying, ‘What’s the fuss? I wake every morning classical, and fall asleep every night romantic!’ A wave of laughter crashed up and over. Nadine caught her breath, and gave a tiny hysterical laugh.
‘And oysters, I think,’ said Major Locke, ‘just to get us going.’
She could hardly bear it. It was all so beautiful. Living, extravagant loveliness flooding around her as though Étaples didn’t exist.
‘I miss him so much,’ she said. ‘I love him so much. I have hardly seen him – I haven’t seen him since July last year. I tried – I went to Sidcup to the hospital but he wouldn’t see me. He wrote to me – he said there was a girl in Paris he was in love with and as soon as he was out of hospital he was going to come here to be with her …’
Locke’s mouth fell open. What the … ‘Miss Waveney,’ he said.
She stopped in mid-flow. ‘I’m awfully sorry,’ she said.
‘Miss Waveney, I was wondering how – indeed, whether – to tell you without embarrassing you that I used to have to read the letters he sent you …’
‘I know. He used to put little messages to you in them. It made me laugh so much. So you know all my secrets. You know all about me …’
‘Well, some things … I have had to read a lot of letters …’
‘I know you know,’ she said. ‘Have you seen him?
‘Not since … not since he was wounded.’ He remembered Riley’s wound. He was thinking. There was no girl in Paris. Riley hadn’t even been to Paris. He had not had time to acquire a girl. And he was in love, so in love, with Nadine.
‘He said it wasn’t serious,’ she said. ‘His wound.’
‘Well, no, it wasn’t,’ said Major Locke.
‘Oh.’
She sighed out of her nose. ‘So do you know where he is now? Is he still in hospital?’
‘I don’t know. Is he?’
‘Rose isn’t allowed to tell me.’
‘Perhaps it is taking a little longer to heal than they expected.’
‘Ten months!’ she said. ‘Or perhaps he has left now. Perhaps he – oh!’
‘What?’
The oysters arrived.
‘Perhaps he is here.’
‘I haven’t seen him.’
‘He’ll be with her. They’ll be in bed,’ she said boldly.
‘Dear girl,’ he said.
‘And of course you’re Julia’s husband, aren’t you?’ she said suddenly. She had so much she wanted to say but all her thoughts, her capacity to think, even, were shattered and rattled by the months of shelling, the gunfire, the fear, the deaths. Her mind was shaking. It had been for months. She poured an oyster down her throat and looked up at him.
‘Yes,’ he said.
‘She was very kind to me.’
‘She is a very kind woman.’
‘I stayed at your house! When Riley re-re-re-rejected me. I was upset …’
‘Well, I hope you come again in happier times,’ he said, and lifted his glass, and drained it. It soothed him to have an excuse for getting drunk. A very good excuse, actually.
‘Bong jaw, Locke!’ said a man passing by, an English officer, with an almost invisible leer at Nadine. ‘Who’s your pretty friend? Your friends are always so pretty …’ He stopped at their table, and grinned.
Locke tightened his elbows, holding them in to his sides, resisting the urge to punch the man. He leant back instead.
Nadine glanced at the officer. At Major Locke.
Locke was toying with his glass, looking at it, twirling the stem a little. He looked up at the man. ‘She’s a nursing member of the VAD,’ he said gently, ‘stationed at Étaples where she deals daily with our mortally wounded comrades. This is her first leave – and probably her first decent meal – in six months. Her fiancé is in hospital in England, having had his face blown off at Passchendaele. Her father is the conductor Sir Robert Waveney, who raises all that money with the Patriotic Benefit Concerts. Anything else you want to know?’
‘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.
&
nbsp; 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.