by Louisa Young
It wasn’t Peter, or Riley.
‘Rose?’
The sound of a human voice shook her.
‘Hello …’ she said.
‘It’s Nadine.’
Rose’s lassitude fell off her.
‘Oh, Rose, I’m in Dover. I’m … I just got off the boat. Look – can I come? There’s a train in ten minutes. I’m meant to be going home but I can’t face it.’
The cold damp metallic air of travel and outside and railway soot blew clear as a draught down the line through the rainy night into the golden lamplit drawing room.
‘Of course,’ said Rose. She remembered her first night back in Blighty, after her stint, years ago.
‘I’ll walk from the station,’ said Nadine. ‘Don’t bother Harker, even if you have fuel. Thank you.’ The line went dead and the cold disappeared again. Rose replaced the earpiece, and noticed that she didn’t mind being taken for granted by Nadine. Because Nadine took nothing else for granted, it was a compliment.
Rose went to find Harker, to send him down to meet the Dover train. It was a filthy night.
It was only then that she thought, If Riley does go looking for Peter, if he finds him, if he brings him here …
Oh.
*
Nadine blew in two hours later, cold, still in uniform, a kitbag that hardly counted slung over her narrow shoulder. Her face, always sallow, was waxen. She still looked like a tomboy Lillian Gish. She placed her bag in the hall, and hugged Rose carefully, dripping. Her body was strung tight as a wire.
‘Gosh, your hair!’ said Rose.
Nadine smiled. She didn’t seem able to talk. The rooms were huge and extraordinary to her.
‘We have hot water,’ Rose said. ‘Running water,’ and they both smiled hugely.
‘Running water!’ said Nadine.
‘Julia had it done.’
Nadine made a ‘My dear!’ face, and took off her heavy overcoat.
‘Well, yes,’ Rose continued, conspiratorial, apologetic. ‘She has a way … Life goes on, you know …’
Nadine flinched, a tiny flinch, like the movement of a leaf on a still day.
Rose gave a little breath through her nose. ‘Still no Millie, though,’ she went on. ‘She’s staying on at Elliman’s. They’re converting to motor-cars.’ Why am I saying that? Am I trying to demonstrate the household’s suffering to Nadine? Offering credentials?
Rose would bring the bag. Nadine would go on up. ‘You’re in the blue room,’ Rose said. ‘Help yourself to the bath salts.’
The room was the same. The deep turquoise walls, the gleaming pink-hearted seashell from the Bosphorus on the mantel, the pale quilted bedspread. Nadine gazed at its clean softness. She had not been in England for a year. She had not been in this room since the autumn of 1917. Since …
‘Since’ was not a good word. Don’t let ‘since’ in.
Her bag had precious little in it, but Rose had laid out a nightdress, a dressing-gown and slippers, God bless her. Slippers!
Folded on the quilt was a great soft bath sheet. Nadine stared at it, took its soft pile between her fingers. She had very often thought about this. At the start of many short nights in damp mal-framed canvas beds, still wearing eight-days-on-the-trot underwear, with the cold gnawing the small of her back and the fleas dancing gung-ho, or when faced again with a jug of cold water and a whistle calling her to duty, she had rehearsed the joy-to-come of a hot bath. The discarding of dirty stinking clothes. The sound: rushing water, lots of it, the clanking of plumbing, the roar of the pipes hurtling to her comfort, the hiss of steam and creak of great big taps. The luxurious smell, the choice: lily-of-the-valley? Lemon? Rose geranium? Now, she found herself staring at them, bemused. The cold tiles of the bathroom floor; the rubber underfoot of the mat. The hard echo of a tiled room with a high ceiling. The slow descent of the body into the water. The flood of blood to the skin, and the tingling, flickering, shivering release from the flesh of the deepest cold, the tightest tension, rising off the skin like bubbles, bubbling, gone … The promise of a big towel, warm from the rail, of a big fire.
She unpeeled herself, dropped her war and travel-stained carapace, and stepped into the large enamelled tub. She was amazed. How extraordinarily strong a physical pleasure could be.
She slid below the surface. Her hair lifted and floated. I’ll just stay here, she thought, opening her long eyes under water, a naked Ophelia, shivering. This is perfect.
Her lungs wouldn’t take the water. Unlike the bodies of many of the men, her body was still sane.
She washed her white legs, her cropped wild black hair, her thin arms and every other part. Between her toes, behind her ears, pushing back her cuticles with her thumbpads, rubbing her feet with the pumice-stone. How absolutely extraordinary to look at her own body so, to have so much time to pay it so much attention. There it was. Flesh. Undamaged. How absolutely extraordinary to clean and tend an undamaged body. A female body.
She flexed her feet, rolled her shoulders, bent her knees, lifted her arms. No wrong bends, no patent holes, no leaking. Nothing missing. Nothing shattered. Nothing rotten.
Wrapped in the big towel, she called gently from the doorway: ‘Is Major Locke here?’
‘No!’ called Rose. ‘You can come down in your dressing-gown!’
Nadine brought the towel, and rubbed her hair in front of the fire. Rose had poured two small glasses of golden sherry, and lit the little candles on the Christmas tree. What luxury! They reflected in the gilt mirrors at the back of the room, twinkling. For a mad instant, Nadine expected a tiny crack and a boom, the sound of tiny shells to accompany their tiny light, and felt a tiny twinge of adrenalin, an aftershock of the bitter metallic sweaty layer that had shivered her limbs, destroyed her nights, coated her mouth, lined her existence for the past year.
It’s over, it’s over.
‘I can always scarper upstairs if anyone comes,’ she said. ‘But where is Julia?’
‘She hasn’t been very well,’ Rose said.
‘Poor dear!’ said Nadine. ‘Not this flu?’ she said, with sudden concern. ‘Rose?’
‘She’s gone to bed,’ Rose said. ‘You’ll see her tomorrow.’
‘Well, she’s in good hands with you,’ Nadine said.
Rose smiled.
*
Julia’s burnt-orange curtains hung heavy and overlong to the floor, a second layer over the windows with their closed box shutters. The room was stuffy and miasmic. One lamp burnt low on the table by the fireplace, and the corners of the room were dim and lost to her. She slithered a little on her sheet, her legs moving as if under water. It was not clean enough – seamy, somehow. Slippery. She felt her negligée moving against it, and didn’t like the feeling. Her mind was a mist to her. Like swimming through icing sugar.
She heard Rose and Nadine downstairs. She couldn’t sleep. She hadn’t been able to get rid of the little edge of tension she had built up in making sure she remembered to do Tom’s stocking – sweet little sleeping Tom – Peter, come and see how dear he is. We can start again, the three of us. I could have another, a little sister for him … Her mind gagged on the words. Not by a man who didn’t love her, who didn’t find her attractive, who kept away from her, shaming her by his absence, in front of Rose and the servants and the neighbourhood, didn’t even write to her, didn’t even come to see his child …
She dragged herself up and looked at her watch on the bedside table. Well, he won’t be coming tonight. As the familiar phrase passed through her mind she slipped automatically, yet again, into the familiar spirals of resentment and fear: broken limbs, other women, motor accidents, shell-shock … those loyal ghouls lining up again at the end of her bed, conscientious, hideous, pulling strings in her belly, polluting. A new one had joined the rank: at least when he had been in the trenches it had been something outside keeping them apart – but now he was doing it all by himself.
Damn him – no! Don’t damn him. He has suffered and must be allow
ed for, whatever it takes, whatever it takes. Don’t give up now. Peace has come! Now is the time to be strong.
Round and round.
Hold on, be strong, he has suffered, don’t blame him. (Blame yourself, came the echo).
Lines from a poem were haunting her – ‘We have years and years in which we will still be young,’ or something. What were they talking about? Nonsense. Young was for – the others. Those creatures who had been at school all this time, those buds bursting into flower only now, fresh, happy, innocent little things untouched by the war. Peter should go off with one of them – forget all his harsh grief, all their resentments. A young girl could dilute his sorrow with her innocence. Maybe that’s what was happening right now …
NO! Everything will be all right now. He’ll be back soon and everything will go back to normal. We can make it right.
She was cold.
A dark anger lurched inside her. Surely things had been going to be different when the war was over. She threw back the covers, crossed the room to poke and prod the fire, feeling the heat on her cheeks. Cold back, hot face. She could almost feel the capillaries bursting. More damage …
As long as she was beautiful she would be loved. As long as she did her bit. Took on her responsibility. There had been nothing she could do for so long except wait, and be pretty. It was so unfair that the last treatment hadn’t worked. SO unfair. Bloody Madame Louise and her bloody useless treatments. ‘Bring back the bloom’ – oh, the liar.
And now the waiting was nearly over – Oh, you look dreadful, old and tired and dreadful – and she had waited so long that she was … Miss Havisham …
And where is he? Where is he? Where is he? Weeks since his letter, years since …
Not for the first time she thought of Penelope, weaving and unweaving her tapestry for Odysseus. Europe must be full of Penelopes, failing, one way or another, to cope. Oh, Rose, of course I wanted to be more like you! Meanwhile, the open-ended, eternal absence continued. And what would he be when he finally came? And what would he find?
She straightened up. The dressing-table mirror flashed the fire back at her, and the three glass bottles she had stolen from Madame Louise twinkled.
As she moved towards the dressing-table, she felt the little click of helplessness in her head – like the one she felt when she walked into a shop, knowing she was going to buy something she didn’t need, following the lines of desire that pulled her immutably along, when no one was watching … no one is watching so I can do this thing I shouldn’t do … As she had known that she shouldn’t steal the bottles in the first place, shouldn’t have bought half the clothes she had bought recently, shouldn’t have carried on with half the things she had had done to her face, shouldn’t have let Rose’s mockery discourage her, shouldn’t have let her mother take Tom away.
She sat at her dressing-table and hated herself.
Her skin looked so dull, even in this light. She stared at herself, trying not to cry, not to make her eyes red.
How could you be so shallow and so wicked?
The loss of her youth, the golden years they should have had that the war had taken from her, the past, no past, no present, what future?
Thirty. Thirty thirty thirty thirty thirty. Horrid word. Between thirsty and dirty and flirty. Thirty.
She knew she should leave the bottles alone.
She knew she had never been going to.
*
Rose and Nadine ate the soup at ten o’clock. Nadine hadn’t eaten since a roll on the train at breakfast. Peter didn’t arrive.
‘He’s very taken with London at the moment,’ Rose said. ‘Very busy. Probably he got the offer of a lift down tomorrow. You can’t always get through on the telephone.’ Who am I protecting? she thought. Nadine can read between the lines, anyway.
Nadine noticed, but she didn’t say anything. There had been too much that she couldn’t do anything about. Too much, for too long. She couldn’t think what to say.
So, ‘And how are you, Rose, my dear?’ she said instead – and immediately damned herself for letting that impossible unforgivable question slip out, that tiny little question, the question no decent guest or friend could avoid asking, that simplest, most treacherous little question that leads only into the mire. There was only one honest answer, one she’d had often enough from the Tommies: ‘Not a flippin’ clue, darlin’.’ Or as one sweet boy had said thoughtfully, moments before dying, ‘I don’t know. It’s a very complex question.’
Here, now, to Rose, ‘How’s work?’ had to follow, and that would lead on … Well, she might as well say it. It was there, said or not. Her stomach lurched a little. You can forget, you can think you’ve forgotten, you can stay away, you can blot out, you can drown your mind with things that are far, far more important, but some things do not go away.
Nadine had found it fairly easy to acknowledge that she couldn’t go home because it was not possible to change, at one leap, from being what she had become, in France, to being something she could allow her parents to see. And home was the past: unbearable now. Possibilities. Might have beens.
Be straight, Nadine. Before – before the war, and before Riley’s betrayal, there had been – God! The significance of it all, so trite! – notions of innocence and the possibility of happiness and … Before the war was Riley. But it was all Riley. Riley was everywhere. Before the war, during the war, in France, in the field hospitals, in the stations, in the letters, in the absence of letters, in the shouts of the men, in the mist, in the angle of the kitbag on the shoulder of the stranger on the street, in London, in Paris, in the park, in the estaminets, in the Lyons tea rooms, in the mud, in every bloodstained bandage, on the trains, on the road, in the dark, in her dreams, in the night, in the dawn. And here … yes, Riley was here. Of course Riley was here.
Wherever he might actually be, in reality.
‘Busy,’ said Rose, a little briskly. ‘A constant supply still, as they’re starting to get people back over here. It may be over but …’
Nadine gave a pale smile. She knew about that. So many men, wounded or not, alive or not, who would not be home for Christmas. Such an echo of 1914, that phrase. She wasn’t going to ask. ‘So tired,’ she murmured instead.
‘Of course,’ said Rose.
‘Think I’ll turn in. Such luxury! Clean bed!’
‘Your hair’s still damp,’ said Rose. It didn’t matter. ‘Well, I’ll see you in the morning.’
‘See you in the morning,’ said Nadine. ‘Happy Christmas!’
*
In bed she lay and thought of Riley’s face and Riley’s arms and Riley’s warmth and every part of Riley, and she cried herself to sleep.
Rose sat by the fire, and blinked slowly, in time with her breath. In, shut; out, open.
*
Rose’s muscles were strung too tight and sharp for sleep. Four females and a child under one roof. Herself, sleepless. Nadine, as mad and taut with unspoken distress as any wounded soldier. Julia, who had been so odd for so long, impossible, moody, self-blaming and miserable. Mrs Joyce, so calm, so unchanging throughout everything that Rose could only assume she was half-witted. And Tom, the silent, obedient, big-eyed child, two years old now, whom Rose for one had never seen do anything but stare, as if in bemused horror – which might make him the sanest of the lot of us. She thought about the stocking Julia had done for him: a chocolate coin, a silver sixpence, a little piggybank to put it in, a twirly red and white sugar cane. Daft, for a child so small. But sweet. A sweet, good, generous thing. It will take time; it will all take time. Mrs Joyce was so happy to have him here … God, this house needed family in it again, needed everything to pull back together. Needed peace for the damage to settle, and to heal, and to pass. Needed sleep. Needed the men back – the man. They only had the one between them all.
It seemed to Rose that she had been good for a long, long time. Could she go off duty now? Could she have a breakdown? Get drunk? Sleep? Disappear? Be carried away, elsewher
e, to safety, to where she was no longer expected to carry anyone else? Anaesthesia, a hospital bed, the swift release of responsibility to somebody else, or to nobody, just not on her?
She’d carried them all in her time.
A breakdown, perhaps? A nervous collapse? That would be nice.
She was not aware that the storm had died down until she heard the sound of the engine outside. Her brain cried, Emergency! and she was standing in the silent midnight hall, her heart a-batter, before she was even fully awake. The floor was cold beneath her feet, and the night shadows strange. From the drawing room she heard the little shifts of the embers of the dying fire.
Through the glass panels of the front door the car was sleek and dark. The rain had stopped and the moon raced on high in the wind that had blown the storm away. Black twigs and branches were silhouetted around the drive. Rose could see it all clearly but found that she did not know what to do.
She saw three figures. One was drooping, a limp doll figure – injured?
Was this tableau outside something to be admitted to the house? Or something to hide from? Her judgement had fled; her decisiveness bolted.
The doll was tall, swooping, stumbling. Drunk.
Peter.
The front door was locked. Of course, she had locked it. Where were the keys? Where had she put them? She didn’t know where she had put them. The tableau was unfolding. She couldn’t open the door to it. She felt very strongly that if she let the men in, chaos would come too, and either the house would subsume it, or it would subsume the house. But there was chaos already within. Decorous repressed chaos for ladies. This was male chaos.
Of course – there they were, tucked up on the little shelf by the grandfather clock. Same as always. Open the door. She struggled with it, pulling, rattling. It came open.
Two men were half carrying Peter, his arms around their necks, lolling like Christ crucified, or a wounded man coming in. One of them was Riley, and her heart was glad.
‘Is he all right?’ she said. Another figure appeared – Harker, in his nightshirt, down from his room over the garage, with a blunderbuss. Rose was disconcerted by all the sudden masculinity in the house.