Heroes' Welcome

by Young, Louisa

  The loss was compounded by the fact that, on their return from Italy, they moved straight in to Nadine’s childhood home on Bayswater Road. Why would they go to Chelsea when the house was empty but for her father, standing there like the last reed in an empty lagoon, desperate? Riley accepted that Nadine and Sir Robert both needed it. A house of grief is a house of grief, and there is nowhere to go, nothing to do. Just wait.

  ‘You take her room,’ her father said to them. ‘I don’t need it. I’m in my dressing room. You go on …’ so Nadine and Riley had found themselves in among all the stuff, her mother’s detritus, the scent bottles, the underwear, the stockings and books and …

  Riley took one look, and found it unbearable. He had married Nadine, not her mother’s ghost.

  ‘Do what you want with your mother’s things,’ Sir Robert was saying. ‘I know I should help you, but …’ and with that he had gone out of focus, and Riley very much wanted Nadine to say to him, ‘Papa, I can’t do it on my own,’ but it seemed she couldn’t say that.

  Riley telephoned Rose.

  *

  It was Rose, of course, who helped; who found the dress shop to take the good clothes, and the charity to take the everyday ones, sorted the papers with Riley, sent the ugly jewellery to the bank and told Nadine, in tears over the jewellery case, that it was absolutely all right, indeed necessary, that she keep and wear the little emerald ring she was holding and staring at.

  ‘I just wish it had been different,’ Nadine said, meaning so many things – everything, really – Dad’s widowing, my mother’s wastefulness – what was it I said? We’d have time to get over our tiff? Something – ha! Never assume, never assume. And now she will never have the chance to know what her son-in-law really is … and I have lost the chance to make up with her – pigheaded – and now Riley is being strong for me – well, he’ll like that – but he’s so tender – I must not forget him …

  And Rose, though she couldn’t know what Nadine was thinking, was there to agree.

  *

  Riley chafed. He had looked forward to the two little rooms in Chelsea, rent to be paid by him, because he was going to be earning, and then things would be right. At the moment, Nadine had an allowance from her father, which was bigger than Riley’s pension. Riley hoped that Gillies was not going to suggest he had his pension reviewed, with a view to an increase. He did not want an increase and he did not want to talk about it. He was still glad that the whole pension issue had been dealt with by someone else while he had been out of action, because to be honest he’d rather have no pension at all. But, yes, I am a married man now.

  He did not actually know anyone else in his situation: wounded, scarred, a class-traveller, semi-educated, proud – so it was to himself that he talked. Coming up to a year after the end of the war; three years since his wounding. It was time to do and to act again. How was he going to be? The trip to Italy had been magnificent. The rediscovery of Nadine’s love had been transcendent – Oh, sweet Jesus, if anything could make a man a man again, that could.

  But now?

  More.

  Specifically, work. He had to work. He had to choose, to decide – to commit. All around him were unemployed men.

  *

  He had been visiting his father. After the first couple of times, he took to going on Sunday mornings while his mother was at chapel. She was so angry with him, and he could not make it out. She did not treat him as she used to. It was as if he was not himself to her. Since the day when she had burst into the ward and not recognised him … does she not recognise me still? In some ironic metaphorical way? Is she angry with herself? Or with me? He suspected that it was her keenness not to make him feel singled out by extra kindness that rendered her harsh, and then regret at her harshness made her suddenly sweet again. It was tiring. But that would be his mother’s way. Elen, if she was there, took little notice of him. She made it clear she had better things to worry about: the heels on her dancing shoes; a kitten she found in the street; appointments. Her own life.

  He did not feel capable of putting it right. He would, though. It was on his list.

  Merry, on these occasions, gazed balefully from behind the teapot and occasionally snapped at them for their harshness, weeping and saying, ‘How you can be so unkind to him, after all he’s been through?’ and giving him extra cake, which he couldn’t eat, which did nothing to make him feel better. Well, there we go, feeling better is not everything.

  His father John was the one who made sense. He would sit in silence while they both looked at the paper, or played a game of cards, saying nothing when there was nothing to say, and from time to time saying something thoughtful.

  ‘Is it time to start working again, Riley?’ he asked. ‘I should think you’d be tired of sympathy and fuss.’

  ‘It is,’ Riley said. ‘I’ve got a plan. I’ll keep you up to date.’

  ‘Good boy.’ A smile. He didn’t need anything more.

  That’s all there is really, isn’t it? Work and love, love and work.

  *

  His education had been bothering him – or rather the lack and patchiness of it.

  Immediately on his return to London, after doing what he could to help Nadine and her father in their quiet, debilitating business of condoling, reliving and weeping, he had located a working-men’s college, and of his own accord re-entered the path of self-improvement he had been on before the war. He took classes in history, political theory, English language, French and Italian. His days, largely, were free, but almost immediately he found a way to fill them. He pretended that he had none of his blessings. He sat in a café with one cup of tea for hours, feeling fake but at the same time feeling more authentic, in some ways, than he felt at home with his lovely wife in her father’s house. One morning, leaving a café in Queensway, he saw a card advertising for a waiter. He stepped on outside, looked up and down the road, leant a moment against the yellow brickwork between the shop fronts, swallowed a couple of times. He stretched his mouth wide, tapped his tongue to the roof. He went back in. His hands clean, his clothes good, his face well shaven, his mouth exercised, he enquired of the woman about the job.

  Very civil, she said, ‘You’re a fine man and no doubt steady on your feet, but you’d put the diners off their food.’

  He paused a moment, waiting to see if some burst of anger or shame would make him reel inside.

  It didn’t.

  He nodded. She was right, anyway.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said, and turned to go.

  In the early edition of the Evening Standard there was an advertisement from a typesetters, wanting a man. They were just on the Harrow Road, so he walked up there. The girl on the desk gave him the ‘you’ve lovely eyes what a shame’ look. He glanced across to the men on the floor in their brown coats; they glanced back. He’d spent an hour, once, with the chaps who used to do the Wipers Times. It hardly counted as experience, but he’d liked it: the precision, the smell, the skill.

  The manager in his shirtsleeves sat Riley down, asked him various questions, nodded at the answers, didn’t write his name down. Riley said, ‘You haven’t written my name down.’ The man smiled, nervous, and said ‘Pardon?’

  Riley stared across the desk at him. ‘Are you pretending not to understand me, because you have no intention of employing me?’

  The man kept the nervous smile and made a face as if to say, I’m sorry I didn’t quite catch that.

  Riley was ninety-nine per cent certain he was putting it on. He tapped his finger on the desk, thoughtfully. Then swiftly he stood up and walked, under the man’s protestations, back to the setting room. He looked around: there were the tiny print blocks with the letters of the alphabet, all the fonts and sizes, upper and lower, spaces, punctuation. There was an empty frame, waiting to be used. Foolish, Riley thought, but he did it – grabbed the letters from the nearest array and wrote out: ‘If you want a man to think you are taking his application seriously, you need to write down his name.�
�� ‘Name’ came out as a widow, so he kerned between the words to bring it back up. The font was spacy on the rack, so he looked for leading, did the little calculation of size, slotted it in. It didn’t take long. The expostulations from the manager died down. The men were glad of the interruption. They just stood around watching him till he finished.

  Now what? Riley thought. Print it? Hardly. They can read backwards anyway.

  And: that was unnecessary, really …

  He glanced up again at the men, bit inside his cheek, nodded to them. Left. Yes, that was childish and embarrassing, but perhaps I made a point … He wasn’t angry. He liked the accoutrements of printing, though. But no, he didn’t want to be a typesetter.

  Time to investigate the other end of his social territory. An art gallery in Cork Street needed someone to write their catalogue entries and co-ordinate exhibitions: he’d written to them and the letter, with Sir Alfred’s endorsement, had been well received. But in the flesh, one look at Riley’s face turned the nice young man pink and flustered, as in the kindest terms he explained that he didn’t really – that this was Cork Street – that the kind of people with whom one would – well – and Riley just thought, Poor boy, and said to him, ‘Never mind.’

  Later, walking up to Piccadilly Circus, he found his fists clenched. Why now? Did you expect the middle classes to respond better? No, it wasn’t that. He shook his head to clear it, and stepped up into Soho, into the first pub he saw. Staring into a pint of half and half, he thought, I might have liked that job. I could’ve done that job. I wouldn’t have been dealing with the public. I had a top-of-the-range recommendation for that job from a bona fide member of the establishment, and even so the lad wouldn’t even look at me. Even if – though? – I am only looking in a spirit of enquiry, it’s a depressing bloody outlook.

  Such assistance as he located, in practical matters of adjusting to civilian life, was attached to churches, temperance societies, and virtuous women of a certain age. Everywhere he looked, he found a shortage of information – or anything else – to assist the semi-educated war veteran – myself. Myself, if I hadn’t the advantages of having gone up in the world. Which I have, and I still can’t find anything.

  And this is London! How’s the rest of the country?

  *

  He went up to Wigan for a couple of days to visit Sybil Ainsworth and the family. Right across from the station stood the Swan & Railway, where he’d popped one at the barman. Shameful. But understandable. You had a reason, but that’s no excuse. He found he was smiling. It sounded like one of Jack’s phrases. He let the memory of the man and his kindness wash over him a little, and just stood there, not fighting it, not resisting it or willing it away. Jack Ainsworth. Good man. Glad I knew you. Wish I’d known you longer.

  A gang of ragged children had seeped out of the alleys and surrounded him now, crying, ‘Carry yer bag for a copper!’ followed briskly by ‘Eeeyuugh! Look at ’is face!’

  ‘Thanks, you little maggots,’ he said, and they squinted at him and ran away. Almost a rank of young men with old eyes were lined up on the cobbles: an arm missing, a peg leg, overcoats shiny, and a tray of matches or pencils hanging across their chests. Next to medals. He didn’t look at them direct. A conspiracy of circumstance had robbed one of them of a limb, another of a face, another of his wife, another of his job. They needed something, all of them, but they didn’t need to go looking at each other, comparing or pitying.

  Riley set his two legs walking, and headed for Poolstock, where his friend’s widow and fatherless children lived.

  ‘You’re just in time,’ Sybil said laconically when he arrived. ‘We’ve the bakers and the miners out on strike. The demobbed fellas are banned from the union so they’re not getting strike pay. You could go over to Liverpool if you were feeling brave, i.e. foolish. They’ve brought in the troops.’

  I should go over there, he thought. I should see what’s going on.

  ‘You’re not going,’ she said. ‘I know your type. Too bloody good for this world. You’re not going. It’s not safe.’

  It’s true, I’m not. He wondered how he would feel in a crowd with the smell of violence and the fear and the anger. He gave a tiny snort of bitter laughter. I don’t know what I’d do. Would I cry in public? Want to go home, please? Or would I batter everyone I could get my hands on?

  ‘Ah, well, Mrs Ainsworth,’ he said. ‘It’s just not safe anyway, is it?’

  She gave him a look, and she sighed.

  ‘Call me Sybil,’ she said. ‘You daft article.’ He was pleased to be with them, to help out, take a couple of good long walks on the moor, to listen to Annie’s piano practice, to chat, much better than he did on his previous visit. The passage of time, and the family’s comments, demonstrated to him how much he was improved. But he remained jumpy. He slept badly on his last night, and was woken first by the knocker-upper, tapping the long pole at bedroom windows along the street, then by the fluttery clatter of clogs along the road as the millworkers headed in for the day. Later, as he walked to the station, the dank canal on one side of the road and the river on the other, he stopped at the bridge and looked over, expecting the usual, clear water or dirty water – and saw red, bright red. For a moment it was something tremendous: blood, the coats of dead Frenchmen, early on … and then Ainsworth’s voice came back to him, telling him how the Douglas – the Dougie, he called it – runs a different colour every day of the week, depending what colour they were dying the cotton upstream. You could tell the day of the week by the colour of the river. You could make slides in the ice with your clogs, and skid along, playing the Mucky Daddy. You’d get a black mask if you walked through a pea-souper with a scarf round your mouth. Your dad would take you up to Wallgate or Northwestern to see the trains; he’d call it admiring the locomotives, and you did admire them, because your dad built them. Railway men. Ainsworth, Ainsworth’s dad, Riley’s own dad.

  He walked on, his two good legs, good grateful legs, walking himself into a strange nostalgia, one not even his own.

  It was a sunny morning, and he left his scarf hanging loose. The buildings tall and handsome, the shops with their display windows not empty but hardly full. There were too many men on the street for the time of day, and that same look of frustration and confusion as he passed by. Outside the pubs as he reached Wallgate a handful of men in caps were playing pitch and toss in the thin northern sunlight. He stopped in at the Swan just as he heard the dinnertime whistles blow all across the town. He bought a half, and eavesdropped … ‘They’re bringing the troops in against the looters and a fella was killed … the police are going on strike … all hell’s let loose over there; robbing and fighting, and even the children running mad in the chewing-gum factory.’ Riley let it wash over him; the rhythms of Ainsworth’s accent, the nervy threat of the words. Himself an outsider, yet again. ‘There’s a battleship in the Mersey, down from Scapa Flow, and tanks on St George’s Plateau. English tanks, against English men. After all we’ve been through. They’re saying the coppers’ll all be sacked, and the soldiers get their jobs. Which is at least a bit of work. For some.’

  Would he go along to a pithead to see the strikers, to see what was happening? Something said to him no, go away. He felt troublesome. He wanted no trouble here in Wigan. But the trouble in the air called to him.

  Up the road some men were running. The men outside the pubs turned and looked and started to hurry up there. After only the very shortest of hesitations, Riley was with them. Round a corner he heard shouting – he followed it. Summer day that it was, he put his scarf up round his mouth and chin.

  When they came to the crowd of men, bustling, jostling, shouting, facing off some enemy invisible down the road, they all just entered it, seamlessly, and became part of it. Riley melted in at the back and became one with the thin overcoats and greasy caps, his boots among their boots, his shoulders among their shoulders: comforting, brotherly. He smelt sweat and tobacco, damp cloth and those industrial smells,
engine oil, coal dust, iron filings. An overlapping smell of his father and of war. In the heart of the crowd ill humour had its own smell and its own voice. The jostling was angry, the movement was frustration. Angry scared men were throwing themselves up against an immovable barrier. Bodies crushed him before and aft, and he let them. The shouting was harsh and violent. Riley smiled under his scarf and closed his eyes for a moment. Familiar.

  He wormed his way through to the front, as far as he could get. There were more men than he’d thought, and the mood was bad. A barricade blocked the road, backed with other angry scared men, these ones in police uniform, truncheons raised, faces twisted. Some were striking out, flailing at the crowd before them. Beyond them, an important person went up and down on a horse, stamping, nervous. There came the unmistakable crack of weapon on flesh and bone – and then the noise was extreme: shouts, cries of pain and fury. Stones flew – and he felt a warm and familiar rush, beautiful to him in its way, scarlet in his eyes, blood and fury in his heart. The roar of it filled him; he felt entire, hopeless, helpless, familiar …

  When the metal barrier collapsed, Riley was one of the first over, one of the first to the man on the horse, grabbing his leg, howling, not giving a damn why, revelling …

  Crack of wood on bone and the bone is his, and he is down. Boots and legs – uh-oh. Then he’s being dragged – carried. Someone’s got his shoulders and someone has his feet. Just like the old days, he thinks, half conscious, and he half laughs. ‘Glad you’re amused,’ says a sneery voice, and he’s propped up against a wall, cobbles rough beneath him. Someone pulls his scarf down, says, ‘Jesus, fook,’ pours some whisky down his mouth, and says, ‘Who the fook are you?’

  Riley just waved his hand.

  The men stared at him. One snorted and dashed off again. The other said: ‘Y’all right? That were a crack an ’alf.’

  Riley treated him to a twisted smile. ‘I’m all right,’ he said, though he wasn’t. He could feel his eye and cheek beginning to swell.