by Louisa Young
‘He hit his head,’ said Riley. ‘When I knocked him down.’
She looked at Peter’s eyes, and took his pulse. He didn’t look entirely all right. Even for a falling-down drunk. ‘Bring him,’ said Rose, and they followed her through into the kitchen.
‘Ring for Dr Tayle, Harker,’ she said. Better safe than sorry.
Peter removed himself suddenly from one of his supports, and hung in the kitchen doorway, head slung forward, swaying on elastic arms.
She put on the kettle. ‘Keep him upright,’ she said unsteadily. ‘Riley, can you walk him round?’ She didn’t move. Riley went over, saying ‘Come on, sir,’ but Peter launched himself on to a chair. The cabbie looked embarrassed.
Peter wouldn’t stand up, so Riley made the tea, and Rose said to him, ‘You might as well unwrap,’ and then she started crying.
Riley unwrapped his scarf, took his straw from his pocket, and stirred his tea with it.
Rose wiped her nose, poured the rest of the hot water into a basin and started carefully to part Peter’s hair, looking for damage.
She found it. It wasn’t bad. She washed it. She dressed it. Smell of Lysol. Smell of fresh blood.
Riley swallowed. I can swallow, he thought.
Peter was staring at him.
Oh, yes. He hasn’t seen the full glory of the face before. Time to make it all right for the person looking at me.
He said: ‘Ello, Beter.’
‘Hello, Riley,’ said Peter, puzzled.
‘Hello, Peter,’ said Rose, and Peter said: ‘Oh, Jesus, Rose.’
‘How many fingers am I holding up?’ she said.
‘Seven,’ he said, as if it were a joke.
Their expressions evidently still meant something to him. ‘Oh. Awfully sorry. Four.’
After a while Rose and Riley steered Peter into the study, and made him flop on the divan there. She couldn’t welcome him or comfort him. There was nothing to give. Running on empty. No patience, no tolerance, no sympathy, no strength – no love no words no time no breath almost. All she could say was ‘Go to sleep’. She sat on the side of the divan, her hand on his arm. She sat for quite a long time.
*
The cabbie said, ‘I’ll be off then, I suppose.’
Riley would have said, Stay a little, have a rest, before you start back. He would have said, Thank you.
He shook the man’s hand, and nodded, and the cabbie went out, alone.
Riley sat at the table and thought: We have been outside humanity, beyond the moral universe, where there is no reason and no ground beneath your feet. We have been in a parallel reality. We’re going to have to come back.
He wrote it down:
Talk about it. I want to talk about it. I can’t. I wish I could. I’ve seen the shock cases who can’t talk because their brain won’t let them, because of their shock, and I’ve seen the unwounded blokes who can’t because talking about it makes it real and speaking about the unspeakable makes it as if it weren’t unspeakable at all. Although it is. It’s a paradox. I want to talk to someone. I’ll talk to any of you here – Rose? Peter?
Talking is what you do with who you trust.
Talking is human.
Humans talk to each other.
The truth, the whole truth, nothing but the truth
You can all talk please talk
please trust
please love
I want to feel at home in the world again
We thought our lives were ours
and they have not been after all
isn’t this true? Can we all admit it?
He folded the piece of paper and put it in his pocket and felt suddenly very, very tired. He sat, rolled a cigarette. He stood, walked up and down. He filled the kettle again. He looked out into the hall. When he saw the shape of the doctor at the door, he withdrew into what turned out to be the drawing room. Leave them to it. Nothing he could do anyway.
*
When Dr Tayle let himself in, summoned by Harker and forgotten by Rose, he found no one but a very small boy in flannel pyjamas, staring, and asking was he Father Christmas? He said, no, he was afraid he wasn’t, and then Miss Rose Locke hurtled down the staircase into the hall, pale as anything, saying, through a throat constricted with fear, ‘Don’t worry about him for the moment, doctor, you’d better come upstairs. Tom, go back to bed.’
He heard the low moans coming from the master bedroom.
‘I just looked in,’ Rose said blankly. ‘I’d been sitting with Peter. I heard a noise.’
Julia was on the floor in the dim orange light, collapsed, in a silken kimono strewn with vomit. A kind of turban wrapped her head, and her chest was heaving and fluttering.
‘Good Lord,’ said the doctor.
Her face was a ghostly, ghastly mask of flaking white.
‘Poisoning,’ he said. ‘What’s that on her face? Wash it off. Call for a servant.’ He turned back Julia’s lower lip: the flesh there was grey and sick-looking. He had one skinny hand at her pulse, the other fumbling to open his bag.
‘She’s in shock,’ he said. Rose snapped his bag open for him, and ran to the ewer for water. As she picked it up, the smell hit her, familiar, retch-inducing, and she gasped.
‘Carbolic!’ she squawked. ‘Doctor, the ewer’s got carbolic acid in it!’ She ran from the room – ‘Mrs Joyce!’ – and into the bathroom where she filled a pitcher with clean water and grabbed towels. Back in the bedroom, she threw herself on the floor. She didn’t seem to be a nurse at all: she was a friend, she was family – oh, Julia, what have you done, you stupid, stupid—
She swallowed and stopped herself. Calm. CALM. ‘Julia, my dear,’ she said. CALM. Professionalism was reasserting itself.
‘Julia – something bad has happened,’ she said, to quiet herself as much as Julia. ‘We’re going to make it all right, now, it’s going to be all right. The doctor is here. I’m just washing this off your face, just washing your face …’ Mrs Joyce came up, flustered, bundled in a dressing-gown. Rose was murmuring all the while, soaking off the plaster scales, bathing, bathing, bathing the skin beneath, pouring water, fetching water, flooding the floor around her, almost hysterical in her calmness. The doctor was unrolling a rubber tube, preparing olive oil and charcoal.
‘I don’t think she’s swallowed it,’ said Rose. ‘She’s plastered it all over her face.’
‘Why?’ the doctor said. ‘Bathe her eyes, keep at it.’
Rose was finding it hard to tell what was skin and what was plaster. Unnatural white patches had appeared, dead-looking among the grey. Julia’s heart was still racing, and she shook as a creature does when you try to rescue it.
‘Get her off this wet floor.’
They lifted her carefully on to the bed. Rose’s voice continued like a nun’s at prayer. Mrs Joyce brought soap. The women washed her, washed her, washed her. They put a pillow under her feet, built up the fire, spread blankets to warm her. Mrs Joyce made hot-water bottles and suggested brandy. The doctor said no: water, and lots of it. He gave her olive oil and charcoal anyway. He could not believe, Rose realised, that Julia had covered her face with carbolic acid.
The jars were there on her dressing-table, labelled: phenol crystals, croton oil, glycerine.
‘Croton oil!’ he said disgustedly. ‘Where did she get this stuff? What in the name of sanity was she trying to do?’
Rose was staring at her. She had no idea. She had no idea about what Julia had been doing, what she thought, what she minded, how she had tried to deal with it all. It was as if she hadn’t credited her with having a war of her own.
*
Mrs Joyce was with Julia. In the kitchen Rose sat down suddenly, very heavily, and the doctor said, ‘She’ll be all right, you know. She won’t die.’
Rose raised her eyebrows, shook her head. ‘Well, good!’ she said. ‘Would you …’ She gestured loosely towards the door to Peter’s study, across the hall. ‘He hit his head. I dressed it, but I wasn’t sure …
Good Lord! Everybody suddenly – just falling over, and … ’ They should all lie down. Everybody. It isn’t safe.
Dr Tayle went in, and came out again a few moments later. ‘He’s, er …’ he said.
‘He’s just back from France, doctor,’ she murmured.
‘Well, he’s asleep. Breathing’s all right, pulse is all right. Colour’s all right.’
The doctor poured two small tots of brandy, and they drank, and felt the ripples run off their shoulders. ‘If there’s any kind of …’ he said delicately. ‘I can look in tomorrow and …’
‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘That’s a good … We seem to be rather …’ Her eyes were closed.
All in due course. All in due course. If the drink is really a problem, well, there are places … And the cause of the problem is over … She took another sip of brandy. ‘Happy Christmas, doctor,’ she said.
And Tom’s back … She put her head on her arms, on the table. Four mad females, two broken men, and a child. I’d better keep them all here for a while, for as long as it takes. Perhaps we could take it in turns to be all right. Just till we get an idea.
She forgot for a moment that she had a job elsewhere. ‘It’s fine,’ she said. ‘It will all be fine.’
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Locke Hill, Christmas Eve, 1918
Riley was standing in his coat in the middle of the drawing room, exhausted, wondering where he could clean his tired mouth out, and whether he could just sit here, or lie down here, drop off here. He could walk back through the night to the hospital but he’d rather not and they’d be locked up; he didn’t want to bother Rose or get in the way; there was no point in talking to Peter; he didn’t know the house …
He put a log on the fire, and was just eyeing the largest sofa when Nadine, quiet in her borrowed nightie, poked her head round the door.
Riley turned, saw her. She was already asking a question when she saw it was him, and the words stopped in her throat.
His hand had already grabbed at his scarf to cover himself. It gave an impression of guilt.
His first thought: God, look at her, just look at her, her face, her look.
‘Don’t you dare,’ she said quickly – because it appeared to her like a movement of leaving: a man indoors in his coat, lifting his scarf. And, whatever he was doing here, he was not to leave. She stared at him, seeing only him and the fact that it was him. She revelled in the sight of him. He’d let the scarf drop, and stood before her, helpless, his scarf and his hands hanging by his side, his coat open. Bare-throated, bare-headed. His eyes! Diamond-crush eyes – what are they full of? She couldn’t tell. The tender area at his temples, the flare of his eyebrows, his high forehead with the touch of widow’s peak, the shorn curls a little longer again. The little hollow under his cheekbones. The shoulders, the angle of his standing, the cut of his jib, the fact of him, the lurch he induced, the fear and the tenderness. She didn’t, for some moments, notice his scars.
Then she did. Her eyes flicked: upper face, lower face. Upper face, lower face. Perfect, mangled. Perfect, mangled.
She realised then what his expression was. He’s waiting.
He’s waiting for me to flinch, to cry out in horror.
She stared, straight, confused. His wound was slight. Why the scars? What did they do to him in there? And why is he here? The girl in Paris – Rose?
She didn’t know what to do. None of it made sense.
His scars were too fresh. The damage too much – but that wasn’t damage. It was the facial rebuilding …
It became apparent that he had lied to her.
Look at him. He stood there, hardened. He was expecting pity, and he was armoured to reject it.
She walked up very close to him. She leaned in, so close she could smell the soap-and-man-and-greatcoat smell of him, which made her catch her breath. She put her face next to his, and she whispered in his ear, close against his warm white flesh: ‘You lying faithless bastard.’
His heart lifted and filled, a slow swelling, a huge joy. As she turned he took her wrist, grabbed it, held it tight. ‘Come back,’ he said, in his swollen lumpy voice.
‘No,’ she said. ‘Bastard.’
‘Please,’ he said.
‘Why?’ she said. ‘Liar.’
He lifted his head and the words felt like balm. She yanked her arm away and shook off his hand. She said: ‘What are you so pleased about?’
‘Truth,’ he said.
‘What?’
‘You’re telling the truth,’ he said, but she couldn’t understand him, so he took out his notebook and scribbled it. The method was second nature to him now, but it made her stare.
‘Well, you’re not,’ she retorted. ‘Why aren’t you in Paris with your girl? What are you doing here? You and your slight wound.’
He felt the ground sway slightly as he said, quite clearly, ‘No girl. No Paris.’
‘What – did she drop you?’ Nadine said, her voice clear and true and cruel, and she winced even as the words left her mouth, and at the narrowing of his eyes, and she wished it unsaid, but he swallowed, and he took it.
‘There was no girl in Paris,’ he said. Slowly, lumpily.
That stopped her. She stared at a few points around the room: the orange-glowing lampshades, the brass coal scuttle, the big glass paperweight on the mantelpiece reflecting the light of the remains of the fire. All was shadow and glow.
‘No girl,’ she said.
‘No girl,’ he said. He was about to say, ‘only you’, but the look in her eye stopped him.
‘Oh,’ she said, taking her time, as everything changed and realisation slipped in. ‘You thought I’d drop you so you dropped me first.’
‘Stop saying “drop”,’ he said. ‘This isn’t some social acquaintance.’ The phrase came out mangled but she understood it.
‘Oh, no,’ she said, very fast, ‘of course it isn’t. It’s – how did you put it? Not that I remember every word of your letter – oh, yes: “We both always knew our friendship could not be anything more.” That’s what we both knew. That’s it. Our friendship. Which could not be anything more.’ She stared at him, hard-faced.
He said: ‘I didn’t think you’d drop me. I thought you would stay with me. Out of pity. And that would have been unfair on you. And unbearable to me.’ He closed his eyes. I sound like a drunken, lisping, brain-damaged idiot.
‘Unbearable to you?’ she said, in a nasty little singsong way. ‘Oh dear, what a pity, poor little—’ and he said very faintly, ‘Stop,’ and she did, ashamed but furious, and not ashamed of fury. A fire of anger and frustration and resentment was burning inside her, building and burning. She could not, she would not – more to the point, she did not – feel sorry for him. After what he had done? Was he to be forgiven everything, for ever, because of the bloody war and his bloody wounds? Were none of them ever to be straight with each other again? Were they all to be grateful and noble and gentle and discreet and stiff-upper-lipped for ever more, and never release what was inside? What about truth? What about her, and what she had suffered? What about what she was losing, right here, again, before her eyes? The patronising, arrogant, presumptuous, lying, deceitful bastard.
She turned on him and roared: ‘What if I had wanted to stay with you out of love?’
He gazed at her, steady.
‘And should it not have been my decision?’ she cried.
‘It should,’ he said.
‘There’s little enough any of us can do to have any control. Over anything. And you decided that you were the one to make that decision for me.’
‘I was wrong and stupid and mad,’ he said, as clearly as he could. ‘About lots of things. There are reasons, but there’s no excuse. I’m sorry.’
The ‘sorry’ was a beautiful word. Tears sprang to her eyes. ‘Did Rose tell you I came to the hospital?’ she asked at last.
‘Yes.’
‘Did she tell you how I was that day?’
He flinched. But he
was glad, a mighty clean gladness, which stayed with him and upheld him, because they were not lying, and she was not pitying him. ‘I misjudged,’ he said. ‘I was … in a crisis. I’m not any more.’ Though the words in his mouth were strapped and entangled, his statement was clear, and it flew.
‘You’re not,’ she said.
‘Not so much.’
A log fell sideways in the fire, making a tiny noise.
‘Did you tell Rose to lie to me?’ Nadine asked.
‘Yes.’
Her body was caught in the tension between the force that dragged her to him and the force that forbade it. She was swaying. Furious, still.
They stared at each other for quite a while. She started to take in his face: the laboured movements of his mouth, the careful scars where the flaps had been sewn, his own beautiful upper lip lying familiar across the top of the reupholstered one. The shape of his actual jaw was the same, but there was a padded quality to the flesh, a sense of things at the wrong angle, on the wrong plane. Though a lot of work had been done, clearly, the natural harmony was not there. She was wondering what it had looked like before. What had it looked like when she had tried to visit? What was the initial wound? It had taken so long … When had this been done? Was it fully healed? It looked swollen to her, tender.
How had it happened?
He said miserably: ‘I’ll go in the morning.’
She had the field postcard he had sent her still in her pocket, in her papers, where she always carried it. She rummaged for it now, found it, looked at it.
There. ‘Slight’. She thought of him sitting in the clearing station, or the dressing station, filling it in, his face falling off.
The reality of him was such a shock in so many ways. She was still shaking.
When she looked up, the question ‘How did it happen?’ on her lips, he wasn’t there.
She found him outside, by the burning glow of his cigarette in the pearly blackness, sitting on a tarpaulin-covered garden bench under the shivering stars, and went to him, in someone else’s overcoat and borrowed gumboots.
‘Tell me one thing,’ she said, pulling the coat round her, breath hanging on the air.