‘Where you from?’ said the man, at the sound of Riley’s voice. His left nostril was going up in a look of disbelief. Ainsworth used to do that. Erectile northern nostril. What the fuck am I doing here?
‘London,’ Riley said. ‘Just on my way back.’
‘I recommend that,’ the man said, glancing over his shoulder. ‘Station’s thataway. Here—’ He proffered a handkerchief. ‘Scarf up, cap down, this underneath, and don’t pass out till yer on the train.’
Riley grinned again, like an idiot.
The man – pale eyes, big nose, face like a piece of granite – looked at Riley, made a decision, swore again, hoicked Riley up, and lugged him down a side street, Riley’s arm up over his shoulder. The station wasn’t far. The man dumped him on a bench, and said to a guard, ‘Put ’im on the train to London, Stan.’ Before he left, he glanced at Riley again, and said, ‘Where did you get that face?’
Riley pulled his scarf down. He said, ‘Where d’you think?’
The man lifted his right arm: a sort of mittened stump sat there. Taking the fabric elegantly between the fingers of his other hand, and raising his eyebrows in a somehow saucy manner, he pulled the mitten off. A broad, scarred palm. No fingers. He reached across and patted Riley’s cheek with it. ‘Chin up, old pal,’ he murmured, and turned, and went.
*
All the way back to Paddington Riley could feel the bruises growing, and alongside them the awareness of what he had risked. He touched the tender bruises. Inches from his remaining bits of original jawbone, and from the wire and flesh holding the artificial one in place. He bit his strange lower lip with his surviving upper teeth, thinking, You utter utter fool. You fool.
His head was throbbing.
He was ashamed to go home and face Nadine. Embarrassed like a fool of a boy. No – like a man. To have risked so much after she had invested so much.
He considered lying to her about how it happened.
At Euston he looked in the window of a barber’s shop and saw the black eye emerging, and the dried blood from the cut on his cheekbone. He was rubbing at it with the stranger’s handkerchief when a barber came out, saying, ‘Would you like me to help you with that, sir?’ The barber – short, glossy, aproned – led him in and cleaned him up, giving a little commentary as he did on the history of barber-surgeons, and how he’d been an orderly himself, and that was a nice bit of work had been done on his face, if he didn’t mind him saying so, and after a while Riley found he was weeping, and the barber had the boy bring him a cup of tea.
Riley looked at it, and sighed, and reached for his brass straw.
*
She was furious. She cried and she wouldn’t look at him. She refused to tend the wound, then she tended it roughly, and muttered, ‘I just don’t understand. I do not understand how you would let this happen.’ She said all kinds of things.
He said, ‘Well, you wouldn’t,’ because he was thinking of it as a thing about men, that men are obliged to keep from women, for women’s own sakes. But it made her angrier.
She said, ‘You want more pain? You haven’t had enough? Do you miss it, is that it?’
For a while he took her righteous anger quietly, as he had done before, and perhaps would have to again. Then he said, ‘Perhaps I do. I don’t know. I got angry. It was stupid.’
She said, ‘That you take it all so lightly that you’d – risk— It makes me want to hit you.’ Then she was so angry she couldn’t speak.
He said, ‘That’s how stupid it is.’
Much later she said to him, ‘I know it wasn’t anger that got you into this. You don’t have that kind of anger. What could you be so angry about?’
He couldn’t tell her about the fighting feeling, about the demon of battle bursting out again in him, so unexpectedly, so unwelcomely. He was just too ashamed. It was like when he wrote to her from the front line that he didn’t exist. Even now, he didn’t want her to know the worst things about him.
In the days afterward, he found himself thinking about Peter, wondering what precisely it was that Peter was resisting. Does Peter get the heat under the skin? That flush of violence, as strong as sex, as delicious, but hideous? Is he holding that off?
That was not something he felt he could bring up.
I can’t change much, he thought. Perhaps I can change one or two small things. I must keep out of big groups of men. It might happen again.
*
The chap teaching the English language course was a former school teacher, about forty, who couldn’t for his own reasons bear to go back to a world of small boys after a war spent with the Navy in the Eastern Mediterranean. Riley and he went to the pub together once or twice; a pint of bitter and a little mild masculine conversation. The teacher – his name was Alan Hinchcliffe – had fallen for an Australian girl in Cairo, and been dumped when she chose to go home. He had no family to speak of, and lived in a room in Brixton where his landlady brought him a pie in the evenings. His moustache was depressing and his tweed jacket smelt slightly, but his mind was sharp and precise and his grammar was perfect.
‘Let’s do something,’ Riley said, restless.
‘All right,’ said Hinchcliffe, which made Riley smile. ‘What?’
‘Men like me need to be able to write good letters,’ Riley said. ‘Let’s prepare a pamphlet.’
‘Bloody good idea,’ said Hinchcliffe. ‘How to write letters and fill in forms, that sort of thing? The college uses a printing firm, you know.’
Riley did know. He went down there with Hinchcliffe and they persuaded the owner-manager, a stout man named Owen, to print their pamphlet cheaply as a one-off, with a view to further projects.
‘Further projects?’ murmured Hinchcliffe, raising his brows.
‘Of course,’ said Riley. ‘The other pamphlets. Of the series. And the – books.’
‘Of course,’ said Hinchcliffe.
Mostly, Hinchcliffe did the talking. Riley just said: ‘Improved literacy is good for the printing trade,’ and Owen agreed.
*
Riley stopped going to cafés and applying for jobs he didn’t want. Instead, he and Hinchcliffe sat down together and wrote the first pamphlet – How to Write Good English – and delivered it to Owen. They chose a generic layout, cheap paper and a plain soft cover, and watched as Ermleigh, who had the look of a depressed fish and had been gassed, started to slot the little metal bits of type into their wooden niches. He creaked when lifting rolls of paper. They wanted to stay for the printing, but Ermleigh, coughing gently, shooed them off. He couldn’t work if he was being looked at, he said. They were back the next day, and nearly smudged the wet ink in their hurry to get the booklets folded and sewn.
Afterwards they all went to the pub, including Ermleigh, who creaked when lifting a pint, as well. He had a wife and children. To him, Riley talked. Not about anything in particular. In fact, the not talking about anything in particular was particularly what they did. The four of them sat in the snug at the Eagle, talking gently, making silly jokes. Hinchcliffe was going to get a motorcycle. Ermleigh painted watercolours. Owen just wanted to keep his father’s business going. They found something very calming about each other.
Coming out, Riley was thinking: I’m not going to be the chap with the buggered-up face who gets in fights. I am going to be the chap who does – whatever it is I do. The chap who wrote that book, who published those pamphlets, founded that college, set up that publishing house. Perhaps someone might say, Wasn’t he injured? And someone might say, Oh yes, I think he was. But that would not be the first thing they said. I’m not going to spend my life just surviving the war and my injury. I’m going to live my life.
They sold four of the pamphlets in the pub, and afterwards Riley brought some home.
Nadine smiled.
Sir Robert said, ‘Good man!’
Riley sold them to his fellow students. Hinchcliffe gave a batch to a friend of his, a teacher at another college, who sold them there. Ermleigh took some
to the chest clinic. An ex-serviceman’s benevolent society heard of them and requested a sample. A little bundle went up to Wigan, and another to Cardiff.
*
Riley felt mildly sick walking up from the station towards the hospital. The same trees, the same buildings, the same blue benches. Gillies had offered to see him at his clinic for officers at Regent’s Park, but Riley had said no, he’d come down to Sidcup. Now he rather wished he hadn’t.
There’d be fewer patients. Well, that is good. That is good. No more admissions. Men going home. To what? To family? A job, or chance of one? Somebody to grind up their bloody meals for them?
A few days ago had been Peace Day. The crowds had gathered and the whole of central London had gone bonkers – the park was full of people camping, Allied soldiers from all over. He could not bring himself to look out of the windows at the front of the house. He did not want to see soldiers in camps, and the glorification of military victory. What, was he to put on his medals, with their cheery nicknames – Pip, Squeak, Alfred, and Services Rendered – plus gallantry and wound stripes, and head off for a jolly day out remembering the dead? The King had issued a message to the wounded: ‘To these, the sick and wounded who cannot take part in the festival of victory, I send out greetings and bid them good cheer, assuring them that the wounds and scars so honourable in themselves, inspire in the hearts of their fellow countrymen the warmest feelings of gratitude and respect.’
Well.
It wasn’t a sense of being respected that inspired that crowd in Wigan, or the police in Liverpool, or that made the ex-servicemen in Leamington and East Anglia have nothing to do with the celebrations, or the men in Luton burn down the town hall. That wasn’t why there were riots from Wolverhampton to Epsom, from Coventry to Salisbury. There were employers in Manchester refusing to take on demobbed soldiers because they’d missed out on four years of experience. Four million returning servicemen, three million munitions workers discharged, one-and-three-quarter million wounded. Women who’d worked men’s jobs all through the war being turned out and expected to go home quietly, or back into service. Two-and-a-half-million workers on strike. Revolution in Russia.
Patriotism. Best use of funds. Well. Welcome home, lads. Or am I being churlish? Flags and tea and choirs – isn’t that all right?
Well. Jobs and money would be better.
Good cheer – that was Jack Ainsworth’s phrase. Be of good cheer, in the prayer he carried around. Good cheer was chin up, basically. Chin up, Riley. Artificial chin.
Same entrance, different chap at reception, same corridor. The garden behind vaguely and unidentifiably changed. The lawn dry and hard after the summer. Fewer patients.
Gillies was in his office, and greeted Riley with joy. ‘You look almost handsome!’ he said, and was interested in how the sunburn on his scalp-clad chin differed from the rest of his face.
‘It’s weathered,’ Gillies said. ‘Settled in. No pain? No tension in the skin?’
‘No,’ said Riley.
‘You’ve had a bash,’ he said, touching the cheekbone. ‘Remains of a black eye. I hope you’re not taking risks with my handiwork.’
Riley flushed, and said nothing. Gillies prodded gently, murmuring, ‘No pain? No pain?’
‘No,’ said Riley.
‘Healed up well. Whatever it was, don’t do it again.’ Then he stopped. ‘What was it?’ he asked. ‘Temper? Someone have a go at you?’
‘No,’ said Riley.
‘I thought you could handle that sort of thing,’ Gillies said.
‘I can,’ Riley replied. ‘I do.’
And that was true. He behaved terribly terribly well. All the bloody time. Almost.
Gillies was still staring at him. ‘Looks like a single blow,’ he said. ‘From a weapon of some kind.’
Riley turned his head away, annoyed. ‘I’m not ten,’ he snapped. ‘My head’s my own, whatever you’ve done to it. And don’t patronise me with one of those “hohoho you’re being uppity that’s good there’s life in the old boy yet” answers.’
Gillies said nothing – turned and did something to some papers. In a moment he came back and said: ‘Smile for me?’
Riley smiled rather bitterly.
‘Yawn? Can you?’
Riley could. He did. It was far from the biggest yawn anyone had seen, but it was a yawn. Gillies measured it with a small ruler.
‘How’s the eating?’ he asked. ‘Liquids, solids? Chewing?’
‘Improving,’ Riley said. ‘I didn’t take on any horse steaks in France.’
Gillies was continuing to gaze at him, musingly.
‘Sorry,’ Riley said. ‘Not for getting clouted. But I shouldn’t have said that. Of course you have a perpetual interest in my face and its functioning.’
‘Don’t worry about it,’ Gillies said. ‘You’re absolutely right; you’re a grown man. So – your voice sounds a lot better – mind if we run through some of the exercises?’ And Riley chanted the tongue-twisters: once again Peter Piper picked his peck of pickled peppers, the ragged rascal ran round and round his rugged rock, and down on the seashore she sold her eternal supply of seashells.
‘And how are you?’ Gillies asked, finally.
Riley gave him a dark sideways look. ‘And you were doing so well,’ he said, at which Gillies laughed.
‘Well,’ he said. ‘And, so, work and so forth, have you found something?’
‘I have,’ Riley said, and he smiled properly, and took a couple of the pamphlets out of his pocket.
‘Here,’ he said.
Gillies took it to the window for the light, and read it from cover to cover – eight pages of simple, straightforward, cheaply produced practical advice.
‘Can you let me have five hundred?’ he said, and Riley smiled.
‘You don’t have that many inmates, sir,’ he said.
‘I’ve got a great many more ex-inmates,’ Gillies replied. ‘Everyone who’s left here in the past six months will get one. D’you have them in stock? I’ll give you the cheque now, anyway. And what’s next?’
Riley took another piece of paper from his pocket: a list on which he and Hinchcliffe had been working.
‘How to Write Good English’
‘How to Balance your Finances’
‘How to Make the Best Impression’
‘How to Apply for a Job’
‘Everyday Good Health’
‘Basics of Science for the Intelligent Working Man and Woman’
‘History Up to Now for the Intelligent Working Man and Woman’
He pointed at that last one and said: ‘I’m going to write that myself. And we plan an annual “How to Educate Yourself”.’
‘A Practical Guide for the Autodidact,’ said Gillies.
‘Exactly. Nadine will design the covers.’ Actually, he had only just thought of it. But what a good idea!
‘How will you finance it?’
‘No idea.’
‘Well, let me know if you need investors. I might be able to help.’
That easy? Then I must aim higher …
‘Now—’ Gillies looked at his watch. ‘D’you want some lunch?’
Riley smiled low, and said, ‘I don’t eat with people.’
‘Am I people? Really? Oh well, let’s take a stroll then. We’ve made some changes. It’s quieter now, much quieter. There’s more time to get things more right.’
Chapter Twelve
Locke Hill, July–August 1919
Rose’s Further Correspondence appeared. They were going to give her £800. She was going to study at London University and then at University College Hospital. She would start in September. If she needed more support in future, she was to be in touch with them. She was a clean hatching thing, with wings to spread and a strength and power that had to be acknowledged.
Her life was not over. She was not some dull unloved creature with no purpose, she was not alone, halfway through a dreary life to a dingy death.
The boldne
ss of it! In so many ways she was surprising herself.
Major Gillies shook her hand, said he was proud of her, and sorry she would leaving. Should things not go as planned, he said delicately, she would be welcome back.
‘Do you doubt my abilities, Major Gillies?’ she asked, with the playfulness permitted by their imminent separation and the time they had worked side by side. But she half meant it. She was proud now. Woman Doctor! She bloody well would be the Woman Doctor.
‘No!’ he said. ‘No, indeed. On the contrary,’ and they smiled and it was a little awkward. So then he said, if she ever needed a reference, and so forth, and it was all all right. She would have time for a holiday, even. Scotland, she thought. And so a period of her life was ending, and spinning off.
But to leave Locke Hill! Well, the strangeness should have been in leaving Peter and Julia – but neither of them were there. And that in itself was so strange. The falling apart of things which even if they had not seemed … strong, had seemed permanent.
How much we take for granted! she thought, as she folded her vests to pack them. We all said to each other, oh of course, nothing will be the same now – and here I am, surprised because things are not the same. This period of my life will become like my schooldays, calved off from my life like part of an iceberg, drifting away in the distance as I sail on ahead, until I can’t see it clearly or remember that much about it. How will I look back on these past years? As something marvellous and character-forming? As something important? And shall I have many more such sections of life to live through and then to lose?
For a moment she wondered whether she was a ship sailing through the universe of her life, or whether she was a rock, around which the river of her life flowed. Then she decided it didn’t make that much difference, in practical terms, as she still had clothes to wash and dry, because she was not at all persuaded by the shared laundry at the VAD medical student hostel. And after Scotland she was going to be working very hard.
But the main issue was Tom. That is a child, she thought, who has been left enough – but he is not my child. Mrs Joyce and Eliza were his daily companions; they fed him and scolded him and were fond of him, in the manner of decent-hearted women paid to do such things. But it didn’t seem to be anybody’s job to love him. But it’s not my job … though …
Heroes' Welcome Page 13