After dinner the vicar took to the piano, and there was singing. Very civilised! Mrs Bax, with her white throat and her generous embonpoint, took her place by the upright piano and, aware of Peter’s service record, made sure to keep the songs cheerful.
Peter was all right for ‘I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles’, and ‘A Pretty Girl is like a Melody’, and ‘By The Light of the Silvery Moon’. But when Mrs Bax started singing ‘How Ya Gonna Keep ’Em Down on the Farm (After They’ve Seen Paree)?’, feeling herself no doubt rather modern and bold with the lines about how ‘wine and women play the mischief/With a boy who’s loose with change’, he started laughing not with merriment but with a note of desperation, and the memory of Mabel at the Turquoisine, singing it so differently, so beautifully, with such profound understanding of why a boy needed that mischief and was helpless in the face of wine and women – and oh, God, she sang it on Julia’s birthday last year, which I forgot, one more tiny offence among so many – only last year. Jesus, must time go so slowly?
Perhaps Mrs Bax thought her choices too frivolous – anyway, she and the vicar changed their tune, and decided on ‘Roses of Picardy’, sweet yet respectful. And yet, when she sang, really quite beautifully, the lines about how the roses will die with the summertime, and our roads may be far apart, Peter started laughing again, laughing hard.
Mrs Bax stopped singing. The vicar lifted his hands from the keyboard.
It’s the same to them. It’s all the same. The silvery moon from before the war, the silvery dew from 1916, the wine playing mischief – it’s all just entertainment and civilisation. They know nothing. Phaeacians. They’re bloody Phaeacians.
‘Darling?’ Julia murmured.
Peter rolled his eyes sideways towards her in a kind of desperation.
‘Let Demodokos touch his harp no more,’ he said in a tone of resignation and finality. ‘His theme has not been pleasing to all here.’
So then they stared, like bullocks over a fence. Not unfriendly. Just uncomprehending. Rich tourists in the land of pain.
‘Well!’ said Mr Bax with hostly responsibility in mind. ‘The old songs still have their potency, I see!’
‘Old?’ said Peter. ‘Old? Are they so old? Is it all past, now? You want war songs? I have some!’
He stood up, and caught eyes with his wife, and her eyes were open, kind and loving. He was weeping, he realised, with a sense of idiocy and of letting everybody down, but they were not his world, so who cares?
Idiotes: he who cares only for his own interests.
He raised his eyes to gaze around at them, and said: ‘The famous harpist sang, but the great Odysseus melted into tears … as a woman weeps, her arms flung round her darling husband, a man who fell in battle … she clings for dear life …’
He said it furiously and clearly, but he said it in Greek, and nobody, not even the vicar who might have been expected to, recognised it. Only Julia picked up the word ‘Odysseus’.
It seemed that the duty of pacifying him fell to the vicar, who stood up from the piano stool and said something calming and appropriate: ‘Now now, old man, no need to be angry,’ that sort of thing, in ecclesiastical tones … but Peter turned on him, and said, starkly: ‘You liked my fury well enough, didn’t you, when you thought the Hun was coming for you. You were happy to have my fury protect you then. Weren’t you? But now? Now, oh no. Now I’m to shut up and behave. Now you’re not afraid of the Hun any more, you’re afraid of me—’
The vicar’s wife flinched and blinked; Mr Bax bumbled to his feet, exchanging glances with the vicar, thinking about ringing for a manservant.
Julia, breathing lightly, went and stood beside Peter, very close.
‘I’m so sorry, Father,’ he was saying bitterly. ‘That I don’t just slot back in. Terribly inconvenient. I do understand.’
She put the size, the pure volume, of her body alongside him, touching. She put her hand on his shoulder and leant in, leaning a little of her weight and her breast on his back. It was a movement of trust. He turned his head sharply over his shoulder to look at her, profile to profile.
Everyone was staring at him.
Her eyes were clear and steady.
She leaned up, and kissed him, very softly, on his cheek. It felt to him – actually, physically felt to him – that every nerve ending was peeled raw. Her kiss was on skinned flesh. He thought: I love you. His mouth formed the words: ‘s’agapo’ – in Greek. And she smiled, because that was something he had taught her, in Venice, naked on a bed under a golden glass chandelier, with canal water reflections rippling on the vaulted ceiling.
‘S’agapo,’ she said back to him now.
*
When she came out, he was standing by the car, smoking in the night air, his expression alert, puzzled, miles away, as if listening to something only he could hear. They were silent in the car on the way back, and she held his hand.
At home, he looked for whisky and she did not stop him. Instead she found his books, his spectacles and his glass of water and brought them up to her bedroom, to the bedside table on what used to be his side of the bed. She went carefully downstairs again, pausing to breathe, leaning back a little to counteract the weight she was carrying, taking care on the dark wooden treads. He was standing in the hall, looking lost: again she went and stood by him, her vastness alongside him. With a touch of her hand on his arm she brought him up to her bedroom.
Propped up on four pillows beside him in bed, she listened as he told her, carefully and with much apology, the names of the men who had died at Loos and on the Somme, and something about the dreams he had been having.
He didn’t say, ‘Your body beside me in bed turns into a German boy, a dying boy when I stumbled into the shell hole beside him, a dead boy by the time I left. The sounds you make are the cries and gasps of death. His voice was light and young. His hair was fair. His body was warm and heavy.’ He didn’t tell her that he didn’t know whether or not he had killed the boy, and if he had, if it had been to put him out of his misery or to shut him up. That he didn’t know whether, if he had, that was any worse than killing him in battle. He didn’t tell her that his haunting memories meant nothing because surely, to be valid, one should be haunted by only one terrible memory – there being so many surely, by definition, meant they could not be so outstandingly terrible? He didn’t tell her that he still wrote lists of terrible memories, and changed the order, and wondered if something you are still in, every day, even counts as a memory, and that he screwed them up and threw them in the fire, because even the phrase ‘terrible memories’ became ridiculous, prissy somehow, through repetition.
Stealing the boy’s knife to cut his throat to shut him up, and cutting his throat. Or,
not having the courage to do it, and letting him – how old was he? Sixteen? – take all day and all night to die.
Not knowing.
Leading the men over the top, on the Somme.
Carrying.
But he told her some names.
She said nothing. Sometimes she closed her eyes; sometimes she looked at him; once or twice she stroked his arm.
‘I keep carrying them in,’ he said.
She thought about it for a while, and then she said: ‘You are carrying death. I am carrying life.’
And he said, ‘Arcadia is a sin, you know. That’s why they had to tie him to the mast,’ which she didn’t entirely follow, but she put it away to think about later. Instead she said, ‘So are you dead? Or will you live?’
‘I’m tied to the mast,’ he said. ‘But I think the ship is moving.’ He didn’t really think it was. But he thought, for the first time, that if it were, that would be a good thing.
When he fell asleep, she manoeuvred her great self to reach over to his bedside table, her full belly hanging from her frame like a packed hammock, to pick up his book. And she eased herself back to her own side, and sat back, propped again, with Volume I of Chapman’s Homer resting against the slope. She patted the child th
rough her nightdress and her tight tight skin, and started to read, from the beginning.
Chapter Sixteen
London, August–October 1919
Two letters reached Nadine. The one from Julia, and a smooth cream envelope with an Italian stamp and a Rome postmark, addressed to Nadine’s dead mother, care of the Albert Hall, crossed out and sent on. She still didn’t feel quite that she deserved to perform this most personal of duties to the dead, so she held it for a moment before opening it with one swift movement of her mother’s bone paperknife.
Piazza San Bartolomeo 22
Isola Tiberina
Rome
Dear Signora,
I hope and believe you are in my family. My mother who was name Chantal Elia Fiore before Mendoza tells me you are her sister in her family from Paris. I am living Rome. I was soldier but intend architect. I am curious if you are my aunt. What do you think?
Thank you dear Signora,
Aldo Elia Fiore
Nadine read it again. How charming! You open an envelope and out pops a man in Rome who thinks he is your mother’s nephew. And an aunt! But Jacqueline had never mentioned a sister. Parents, yes – Rafael and Berthe. They were there in the wedding photos, beaming, shiny little creatures from the old century, well dressed, beetle-like. They had visited, Nadine thought, when she was very small. The seventy-three small ivory elephants that she would see if she raised her head, lined up, promenading still in their glass case, had belonged to Berthe. When had they died, the grandparents? Did they even make it into the new century? She remembered how during the dark days in 1918, during that strange interlude in Paris, she had stared at the street they used to live on, wondering if there were unknown cousins on the pavement around her, her own blood passing unrecognised, close by. She had been too weak and shocked to do anything about it then, in the full flood of … then. But the thought had crossed her mind. And again, on honeymoon.
Jacqueline had never mentioned a sister.
Nadine found herself sketching a little family tree on the envelope.
It was so small and neat.
But perhaps it wasn’t! She’d always thought that apart from poor cousin Noel on her father’s side, there was only her. But if there can be an aunt, there could be other cousins.
When Riley came in that night after a day soothing printers in Cheapside, he was still standing by the coat rack when Nadine, fizzing with excitement, showed him the letter.
He hung his coat and took the letter she held out to him.
‘How extraordinary,’ he said, as he read it.
‘I’m writing back,’ she said.
He trailed his hand along her shoulder as he went into the drawing room, his cheeks widening with his idiosyncratic smile. ‘Rather exciting,’ he said, and she touched his hand as it trailed off past her.
She said: ‘Why do you suppose Jacqueline never talked about her sister?’
‘She wasn’t interested in the past.’
‘True. But a sister isn’t the past.’
‘Jacqueline had her way of wanting things to be,’ he said. ‘Of course she should have told you. But she did what she liked.’
‘Or perhaps I was just a terribly difficult person to talk to. Or a difficult child. Was I?’
‘You were sweet,’ he said, and she thought again what a miracle it was that they had found each other and kept each other.
‘Perhaps I was a hard birth, or she wanted a boy! Oh who knows.’ Nadine was irritated at her own sorrow. The previous year, while still in the extremes of the peculiar emotional landscape where the war had dumped her, she had decided that she would never again be upset by anything that wasn’t concretely and immediately offensive to her. Her peace of mind was precious; she would value it. She would not let it be upended by a late bus or an uninterested mother. If there was something to be done about a problem, then it must be done. If there was nothing to be done, then you might as well shut up about it. That’s all. It had worked well, so far. But it hadn’t helped with confused grief for a mother she … couldn’t say it. So ashamed. Didn’t like.
But an aunt might be able to explain to her …
This Roman’s letter just toppled into the small abyss in Nadine’s heart where her troubles with Jacqueline still creaked and lurched. His existence soothed it: food to an empty stomach; water to a dried-out pond. Later that evening she sent a telegram to her father in Chicago:
APPARENT COUSIN TURNED UP ROME APPARENTLY MOTHERS SISTER ANY IDEA LOVE NADINE
The reply came at breakfast:
NO NEVER MENTIONED STOP NEITHER RAFAEL NOR BERTHE STOP WISH COULD TALK PROPERLY STOP HOW ODD HOW RILEY LOVE PA
She wired back:
AM TAKEN WITH MYSTERIOUS POSSIBILITY
RILEY WELL LOVE
The reply:
HUMPH
Nadine wrote back to the Roman, a kind, cautious letter, explaining and enquiring. The reply came in the same ambitious and inaccurate English: Aldo Elia Fiore was so very sorry to hear of the passing of the signora, his aunt. He sent his sympathies, and he hoped his letter written of ignorance had not been a grand intrusion at a time of grief. He was extremely happy to have the knowledge of his cousin Nadina. His information was from his mother, now also, sadly, no longer with us.
Oh. Chantal was dead.
So that was a curious grief: to lose the brand-new aunt she had never known she had, and the link to Jacqueline. It made her decide very quickly that she would not lose the cousin. Meanwhile she saved the Italian envelope for Tom. The stamp had a picture of an aeroplane on it, and little as he was, he loved aeroplanes.
The second letter, from Julia, was, frankly, welcome. It would be – dear Lord! – refreshing to have something other than her darling bereft father to think about; to have some female company – and perhaps Rose would be there; to see Tom, and get some country air, and be out from under of the wing of mourning. She had intended to go to Locke Hill anyway, but the fusses of returning from travel and being flung into the emotions and duties of bereavement had prevented it. Knowing little of Julia’s excursion, Nadine took her condition, and Peter’s being ‘in London’, as signs that normality was gaining a little territory in the everyday life of Locke Hill. She was glad of it. She did hope, though, that Rose would be there. Rose did make everything easier.
*
To Nadine, coming in from the station, up the curved drive to the handsome porch with roses bouncing above it and sunlight pouring down, the house seemed empty. The front door was unlocked and she walked in as if she still lived there. Memories of last winter strung the door like autumn cobwebs: of arriving from France, of Riley turning up that mad night, of how they had sat outside on the lawn smoking under the freezing stars …
It is a simple fact that wounds don’t heal the moment the cause of them stops. Rose said something, early on, about deep bruises taking for ever to come to the surface. Broken bones are forever weaker. Scar tissue has no feeling, which is a wound in itself. It’s no good not to feel or think at all – or is that self-protection because what you would feel or think is unbearable? Is that why so many people are being harsh and brittle, and going out dancing all night? But it’s all so recent still. And probably when you think you are recovered is when you are most vulnerable …
I have lost my mother. I have Riley. I have Riley. For a moment she recalled them dancing under the Chinese lanterns at the Hammersmith Palais: ridiculous kicky jazz dancing, breathless, laughing, falling against each other, all that romantic stuff. Walking home wrapped round each other. One arm round him inside his jacket, thumb hitched on to his belt; the other hand resting on his heart, stroking his face, holding his hand flopped over her shoulder. All the closeness. They fall asleep holding hands. If I never have anything in my life again, having him back is enough for me.
‘Julia?’ she called.
Mrs Joyce poked her head out of the kitchen door. Nadine was so pleased to see her. Floury hands were clasped, and a flurry of ‘oh goodness’ and
‘oh never mind that’ passed between them. Nadine found herself wanting to ask Mrs Joyce how the household was, how was Peter, how was Tom. Indeed she was about to, when Mrs Joyce said that Mrs Locke was in the glasshouse, and to go on through.
Nadine wandered through the house – quiet, well kept as ever – and out through the French windows down to the walled garden and its greenhouse. There were signs of digging and replanting in the old vegetable garden – Harker must have been busy. The lawn that Julia had had dug up for extra food production was weedily overgrown now, lumpy and full of ground elder. Nadine laughed at herself for looking for symbolism, for signs of how they all were in how their gardens grew. Julia’s garden was bedraggled with seed heads and late roses and the huge flaming marguerites, which seemed to have thrived on the neglect of the war years. As if that proved anything. The poppies were apparently marvellous in Flanders this year. She’d read it in the paper. People were going on battlefield tours. There were guidebooks.
Julia was there in a pinafore, poking seeds into ridges of compost in planting trays on the wrought-iron shelves rusty beneath their flaking white paint. Tom sat on the shelf beside her, swinging his legs, asking questions, and trying on her trug as a hat.
‘Julia?’ Nadine said, curiously.
*
‘It’s practical things I need help with,’ Julia said, leaning against the glasshouse shelf. Tom had been sent to find long straight twigs for seedlings to climb when they sprouted. Nadine had been put to sit on a slightly cobwebby painted stool. They had had a polite squabble about who should take the seat, with Julia insisting that she found it more comfortable to stand. ‘I don’t really bend very well in the middle,’ she said. ‘I hardly showed at all till a few weeks ago and then I just expanded …’
Nadine wilted a little inside. More about Julia’s needs. Well, I owe it to her. They were supremely hospitable, even though neither of them was entirely conscious. And her letter was – different.
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