My Dear I Wanted to Tell You

by Louisa Young

He wondered why she was speaking French to him when she was so clearly, from her atrocious accent, English. The answer came on the heels of the thought – Oh, God, of course … She’s assuming I have acquired a taste for the French, over there. It seemed to him strangely pathetic: this English whore pretending to be a French pute … As pathetic as the fact that she can’t conceive of any other reason why a man would be in a place like this alone, unless he was looking for one of her type.

  Woman, it’s over. It’s changing. Let go, for God’s sake. Go back to a decent life.

  But then she probably doesn’t have a decent life to go back to.

  He wasn’t going to look up at her. If you look at them they never leave you alone. As if, once you looked up, let alone anything more, they tattooed you with a secret sign, and then they and their sisters knew, they always knew, and they would always find you. Or perhaps they could smell it.

  ‘No,’ he said. She was spoiling his moment.

  Suit yourself, her shrug said. She perched at the next table and scanned the elegantly seedy room for newcomers. It was too early. She smiled at Peter again, and lowered her eyes. He looked the type to like demure. Nothing else to do, anyway.

  Peter rubbed the back of his neck where it was stiff, stretched his arms out. The sound went through him like a filament along the veins, silver. So pure! And yet it knew everything. Mercury. And fire. It could clean you out.

  It was the only thing that cut through the still-roaring barrage.

  A rather exquisite Chinese man lounged two tables along, wearing a white scarf of the type that used to be called a cataract, held by a diamond pin. He glanced at Peter, offered a little nod suggesting the compliments of the evening, and an exploratory stare. Peter looked away to the bandstand, just as the American girl came on.

  Ah, the American girl. Her name was Mabel. When she wasn’t singing she kept the bar at the Turquoisine. Her skin was deep brown and her hair was shining black, plastered to her round head, her eyes were huge and her lashes lay on her cheeks. She was nothing like anything he had known in France and Flanders, and Peter loved her as he loved Mr Sidney Bechet’s saxophone, because she was so utterly new and strange and beautiful. She greeted him with a little wave, and moved on up the stage with a smile for the sax-player. After a few bars, she started to sing: ‘How you gonna keep ’em down on the farm, after they’ve seen Paree?’ Then a song of her own, one of her long slow numbers, ‘I Saw You Yesterday’, her voice as sweet and harsh as the sax was pure.

  The Chinese man closed his eyes. The prostitute smiled lazily. Peter lit another cigarette, and felt the barrage subside a fraction, and relief emerged, finally, sending out a few tendrils as the music wrapped and washed and purified each drop of his battered mind.

  More people started to arrive. The Original Dixieland Band lot came crowding in, gradually filling the place up, like champagne in a glass, rising, bubbling: a noisy, glittery, laughing splashy mob of officers, swells, the odd dowager, and bobbed-hair upper-class girls, flashing eyes, wet-lipped, short-skirted – the longer the war went on the shorter the skirts became … Lucky for the sake of public decency it’s over.

  It’s over.

  They were ready to be hysterical, raucous, drunk and lascivious. Peter smiled, and drew himself together against them, their glare, their mania, the great surge of pity that flooded his heart at the sight of them, the shards of hatred for those who had sat out the war … To pity or to hate. What a choice.

  Mabel was leaving the stage, going on to her next engagement. Mr Bechet had disappeared, and with him the fire-pure mood. In its place came the new band, in top hats spelling out ‘DIXIE’, clashing saucepan lids, squawking blind gaiety, and fun fun fun. Peter listened to the first two numbers, watched the mad energy and wild dancing they provoked, bare knees swinging, legs flashing, and then he moved out, against the tide. A feather boa snagged on his jacket collar for a moment, purple, light and clinging, and a sharp waft of patchouli, cut with potassium permanganate, caught in his throat. The smell of brothel. The boa’s owner turned and twitched it off him, leaving a little clingy scrap of purple ostrich fluff on his shoulder. She caught his eye, hers heavily lined with black, shining. She didn’t stop talking to man in front of her, but her eyes and her long, painted, chattering smile lingered.

  Outside on the street, Peter leaned on the wall for a while, breathing, closing his eyes. He had in his mind – running alongside the barrage, as if the barrage were a soundtrack – images of then and now, then and now. The girl with the boa, before. What had she been? A tart already? Or a farmer’s daughter? A vicar’s daughter? A schoolgirl? A girl in long skirts, a clean face, an early bedtime, an exchange of glances after church and perhaps a walk, if he’d met her father …

  When did the girls all start wearing cosmetics? On his third leave, Julia had greeted him with blackened lashes and a reddened mouth, like any pute in Étaples or Amiens, and she had cried because he had not thought it beautiful, and he had felt himself a boor. Again. He closed his eyes, opened them, and moved on towards Greek Street.

  The girl in the green dress followed him.

  ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘You want to go somewhere? You got nowhere to go …’

  He looked back at her. ‘Dear girl,’ he said. ‘How about you? Don’t you have somewhere better you could be?’

  ‘Wherever you want, love,’ she said. ‘I’ll look after you. I can see your wife don’t understand you.’

  ‘On the contrary,’ said Peter. ‘My wife is perfect.’ He stared at the girl – nothing to lose now. Thin blonde hair, short like they all had it, thin little knees, a yellow tinge to her skin, eyes painted huge. ‘Were you in munitions?’ he asked.

  She made a saucy face.

  ‘Got used to the money?’ he said. ‘Lost your job?’

  ‘Piss off,’ she said. ‘You don’t look like a do-gooder. I’m all right.’

  ‘I’m not a do-gooder,’ he said. ‘Far from it.’

  ‘All the better,’ she said. ‘Come and tell me about it.’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘I have an appointment.’

  ‘Oh, suit yourself,’ she said, bored suddenly, and turned on her narrow silver heel, her little bottom in the green dress twitching.

  Guttersnipe princess, he thought. Phew.

  Women no longer kept Bloom’s corpse from his arms. Nothing did. There was no point in trying. All that was over. It was over. It was all different now and he was going to be a good man.

  Over. The terrifyingly lovely word. Over.

  And what now?

  The aftermath.

  Now there’s an interesting word.

  He came to the door of a Georgian house of smoke-blackened brick, and pushed his way up the narrow flights of stairs that led to the one crooked room that was the Turquoisine. A very different crowd: drunks, foreigners of all sorts, some Yanks, black men, only one or two slumming aristocrats, on the arms – or in the arms – of unsuitable lovers.

  ‘Welcome to the Turquoisine,’ purred Mabel, already on stage, unpinning her hat, smiling a beautiful big broad smile. ‘By my watch,’ and she held up her elegant wrist where a pretty jewelled bracelet watch glittered, ‘it’s December eighteenth, and that, my friends, means happy one month of the Armistice to y’all!’

  Peter winced as if he had been slapped.

  Today was Julia’s birthday. Oh damn, oh damn.

  Is there no end to the ways I let her down?

  He breathed gently. His hands on the edge of the table were quite white. It’s too late anyway – it makes no difference now.

  He pushed himself off his chair, and went to the bar. ‘Could I trouble you for some champagne?’ he said wearily, courteously.

  The barmaid – a new girl – blinked at him, like a little cartoon lady. ‘It’s after hours, sir,’ she said sweetly.

  ‘Then perhaps you would ring up Eustace for me, Mr Eustace Hoey, on Rupert Street, and have him deliver me a bottle. Moët,’ he murmured. ‘The 1909, if he has an
y left. I may have drunk it all. And a bottle of whisky. That Islay he keeps. To my table – I believe it is table nine. Major Locke. Thank you so much.’ He lurched a tiny bit on his way back to his table. It was as if his body, anticipating drunkenness, launched itself prematurely into the familiarity of the movements, the manners, the quiet danger, the elaborate courtesy.

  I don’t deserve to be anything better than a drunk, he thought. I deserve all the shit that I cause.

  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’.<
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  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: