‘Afraid we’re going to sue him for incompetence, no doubt,’ Peter said loudly, afterwards, sitting on his father’s grave with Kitty in his arms, smoking, smiling his bitter smile, and declining to come home for the wake.
But he’s holding Kitty! Nadine thought. That’s good.
*
And that was the end of 1919. Cold dingy weather, hypocrisy and misunderstanding lurking, all a year older, a year further away from it all. One woman down, one new girl entered, otherwise the same group in the same house. They were all, some despite themselves, aware of the symbolic power of the passing year, and the passing decade. And each was thinking, in their various ways, as they cuddled their teddy, caught each other’s eyes, raised the glasses of sherry which seemed a decent substitute for champagne in this time of mourning, but early, because Lord knows nobody wanted to stay up till midnight, thank God that’s over.
Part Three
1927
Chapter Twenty-two
Locke Hill, August 1927
Time passed. It had no choice. As various people felt it worth saying, during the war, after the war, at Julia’s funeral, in the weeks and months afterwards, Life Goes On. Riley Purefoy, thirty-one years old, sitting in the Leinster Arms after work one high summer evening, sipping a pint of half and half through his brass straw, heard someone say it at the next table.
It does, it does. Its doing so had been on his mind. It was ten years since his war had finished. Do I feel safe yet? Am I still afraid? What do I fear?
He feared that Tom and Kitty might be taken from them – that Mrs Orris might decide to cause more trouble, or Peter recover, and want the children. What if Peter were to die? He had wondered if he and Nadine should try formally to adopt them, but when he had brought it up, she had said no. ‘They have their father, flawed as he is. We can love them and keep them, but blood is blood. It’s not so much about him having them, as them having him.’
It was, he felt, unsettled. But then things are unsettled. It’s their nature. Whatever we may think is going on.
He feared that nothing would ever happen to them again. More often, that fear was a hope. Occasionally he would say to her, ‘What about the motorbike, Nadine? Weren’t you going to have a motorbike and tour the world?’ and she would laugh and say, ‘Oh yes, I’m going to, you on the pillion, Tom and Kitty strapped to the handlebars.’ Or, ‘I have my world here, sweetheart.’ Or, ‘Plenty of time.’
Did he fear that he and Nadine would never have their own children? He thought not. They had ceremonially and rather gleefully thrown the rubber thing on the bedroom fire in 1926, but nothing had happened yet. They were going to give it another six months before thinking about seeing a doctor. Nadine had relaxed into the combination of art and children with great grace and a good nanny, involving the children and retreating as she wished, unburdened by a complex sense of responsibility. When she was with them she was with them. When she was working she was working. She’d made a studio in the glassed-in verandah on the back of the house. A gap between children suited her. He didn’t fear for her, or for the children they might or might not have. They were still only thirty-one years old.
He stood up. He had promised to take Tom for a quick game of two-man cricket in the park.
When he came in, Nadine and Rose were in the drawing room, sewing, deep in one of their interminable conversations. Rose was full of plumbing and child mortality rates. ‘What point is there being a doctor,’ she was saying, ‘when you’re just clearing up incidences of illnesses which with proper plumbing would not occur in the first place? It’s like being a road sweeper in a town without rubbish bins.’
Nadine enquired after various young patients by name: she ran a drawing club in Rose’s waiting room on Thursday afternoons after school. When Kitty bounced into the room, she joined in the chat, drawing club being her favourite. Conversation moved on to whether or not it was too late for Little Tea that day, i.e. tea using the dolls’ blue willow-pattern tea set, with slices of toast made from the tiny Hovis loaves, and slices of fairy cake cut as if the fairy cake were a full-sized cake, and the tiny pot of jam that Rose had brought back from her breakfast at the hotel in Switzerland for the children. Kitty suggested that Dr Aunt Rose should come with her into the back garden to see if the quails had laid, because if so they could make tiny fried eggs, and it could be Little High Tea.
Looking at these beautiful, beautiful women, Riley thought: Never take anything for granted.
*
Crossing the road to Kensington Gardens, cricket bat in hand, Tom, eleven years old, whip-thin, white-haired, blue eyes narrowed, made a declaration: he would no longer go on holiday to Locke Hill.
‘Why not?’ Riley asked.
‘Because of that man.’
‘Which man?’ Riley, ever protective, asked.
‘That father.’
Riley said nothing, letting Tom proceed – which he did, wary but determined.
‘I don’t want him,’ he said, glancing up to check for reaction. He received none, just Riley’s quiet presence.
‘I’ve been thinking about it,’ Tom said. ‘You wheel me down there and I’m always polite, but he doesn’t want me, that’s clear enough. You know it’s true! I’ve had enough of all these parents who are no good and dead and so forth. I’d rather it was all kept simple. You’re my father and Nadine is my mother. I may change my name. I hope you think that’s fair. Because I have to insist.’
How bold his look! Riley thought. But can I blame him? Actually, he rather admired him for it.
‘It’s absurd,’ Tom said, ‘to have parents who aren’t even actually there. Even if they are there. Of course, Mummy can’t help being dead, but she wasn’t even there before she was dead.’
‘What do you mean, old boy?’ Riley said.
‘Going away without saying,’ Tom said. ‘Or crying at Daddy. And Daddy not wanting her. And then too much hugging.’
Riley had to do some quick maths – How old had he been? Three, when his mother died? And people think children don’t notice things … He couldn’t fault the memory. That weeping, pestering woman, tricksy and difficult, always dragging at the boy.
‘I know I’m meant to love them,’ Tom said, looking up at him. His face was white and tense. ‘But I don’t! I think they are hateful, weak, unpleasant, unreliable and treacherous. And I might as well say so.’
This boy will never be rosy and merry, Riley thought, and he was about to speak when Tom, suddenly shocked at his own forthrightness, burst out: ‘Sorry, sir,’ and turned and ran off. Riley watched him, the small figure clomping across the grass in his brown lace-ups, beneath the flat under-surface of the plane tree branches. After a few hundred yards the boy sat down swiftly, up against one of the piebald trunks, and hunched over.
*
People said ‘Life Goes On’ to Tom as well. Chaps’ parents, at school, usually, or beaks. He had developed his own response. ‘Death goes on too, you know,’ he would say. Quite politely.
He was muttering it now, sitting in the pilot’s seat of his Gotha. Also, la mort continue, and la morte continua, mortus continuat, and der Tod whatever goes on is in German. When he ever met a foreigner, which wasn’t often, he asked them to give the phrase in their language. What he really wanted was a Russian. When he wanted to think with fondness of his father, he would recall that Peter had written it out for him in Greek, both Greek letters and phonetic. But he longer wanted to think fondly of his father.
Tom was allowing Kitty, seven years old, pink cheeked, fluffy looking, stubborn, to perch in the forward cockpit: a rusty upright cylinder on whose rim, long ago, a German machine gun had swivelled and shot its fire through the night skies. The bottom was soft with leaf mould and worms, so she sort of stood and leant and wriggled, while Tom was an emperor in the remains of the pilot’s throne, with the remains of the controls before him, no longer dangling, because he, Tom Locke, had fixed them up. He had found the plane years before. In the course of
a picnic, aged five or so, he had run away, scampering through incipient bluebells and old rotting conkers, and there it was. He had thought it was a ruin, overgrown with brambles, knee-deep in sludge and the knotty brown roots of ferns. But when he banged on it a deadened clunk sounded, as if the ruin wanted to let loose a loud and glorious clang but couldn’t. He had climbed on a fallen tree and seen a long body with two flattened and broken wings: an iron dragonfly of massive proportions. Three big circular holes appeared along the top, into which a boy might climb. He had climbed. In front of him, controls: rusting, falling. He had reached out, closed his eyes and stared ahead, and felt the thrum of engines, and the void below, and the wide massive skies above. In the years since, he had measured it, surveyed it, identified it, run away to it, hid in it, counted the rivets on its blunt nose, dug underneath it in search of its wheels, put his foot through its rusty panels, attempted to fix the big oily bundles of engine that lay stranded among its broken wing struts. But he had never told anybody about it. Even Riley might say, It’s dangerous, don’t go there. Or, It’s not yours, leave it alone. But someone must know it’s there. You’d notice, if a plane fell out of the sky. They must all know. But that first time, he was sure, no one had been there – there were no footprints, nothing was disturbed. But someone must have been there. Unless they had jumped out with parachutes. He had always secretly thought: They might be there still. There might be skeletons.
It had occurred to him, when he was so small, that this might be where his mother had gone, and that he’d probably better not mention that. But he’d known that really mothers who have died don’t go in planes, and he’d known even then that there was no point in asking his father. He had looked for the skeletons for years. He never took Kitty with him. He didn’t want her to find them – to be scared, or – worse – to succeed where he’d failed.
But now she was big enough, and she could see his plane. Though the gigantic, delicate wings had fallen away, and anything removable had been taken by older trophy-hunters than he, the body of the plane lay there, an iron ghost, hollow and receptive to his purposes, demonstrative of his superiority, and of his generosity in bestowing this honour. He had something important to say to her. He was telling her, because she had a right to know, that he would not be visiting that man again, and that he expected her not to either.
‘Which man?’ Kitty asked, frowning, because she knew.
‘Father.’
Kitty raised her eyes to him and her mouth went firm.
‘I’m deadly serious,’ Tom said. ‘And if you’re not with me, I shan’t speak to you again.’
She knew he was capable of it.
‘It’s all right for you,’ Tom said. ‘You’re a girl. You aren’t meant to grow up to be like him. I don’t want him, and he doesn’t want me. I’m having Riley for my father and Nadine for my mother. I’ve told Riley. He said it’s quite all right.’
This was a lie. Riley had not said that. But if Kitty believed that Riley said it was all right, then it would be all right. Tom stared down at her, willing her.
‘I think you should do the same,’ he said.
She was picking at a tiny fresh larch cone, pale green, soft and sweet.
‘Where will we go, then?’ she said.
‘I’ve thought of that,’ said Tom. ‘Italy. Nadine wants to go there to see the man that writes her letters. We can make them take us there. Italy is probably marvellous.’
Kitty shrugged, and threw her cone out into the woods. She didn’t know what Italy was. She said, ‘Well, you know I want to go to Italy, but Daddy is still my father.’
He looked at her bleakly. ‘I suppose that is your choice,’ he said. ‘But I pity you.’
‘I don’t care,’ she said. ‘Riley is nice to everyone. I’m the only person Daddy is at all nice to.’
‘So what?’ snapped Tom. ‘Riley’s a good man and Peter’s … an oaf.’ He could see that his calling him ‘Peter’ upset Kitty, but he liked the distance and maturity it suggested. It was even better than ‘Father’.
Once he had seen that he could hurt her, he didn’t actually want to.
‘Where would you go if you could go anywhere?’ he asked her, magnanimously.
Because she was in her own trance, gazing out over blue imaginary skies of her own, Kitty said, without thinking: ‘To find Mummy.’
‘She’s dead.’ Tom said.
‘Dead people have graves,’ Kitty reposted.
‘She was cremated,’ said Tom.
Kitty didn’t know what that meant and wasn’t going to ask.
‘Are you thinking about going to heaven in this plane to find her?’ he said.
She denied it.
‘You want to forget about her,’ he said. ‘She wasn’t nice anyway.’
Kitty objected.
‘She gave me away to Grandma when I was a baby,’ he continued. ‘And she did something mad to her face. I saw it. Her face couldn’t move.’
‘Stop it.’ said Kitty.
‘She would have given you away too!’
‘No she wouldn’t.’
‘Daddy used to hide in his study so he didn’t have to look at her.’
‘That’s not true.’
‘It is true. That’s why he drinks whiskey and needs to go quiet. Ask him. Ask Nadine. Ask Riley!’
As if either of them would ask Riley about a face!
‘She didn’t like her terrible face so she died,’ he said.
Kitty could see the logic of that. Then she thought – ‘But Riley has a terrible face and he didn’t die!’
‘Riley is different,’ said Tom. ‘One, he’s a man. Two, he’s a soldier. Three, he’s a hero. Riley is a superior character.’
And Kitty couldn’t fault him on Riley. Neither of these children had any idea that anybody had ever doubted him. They saw only what Riley was now: a heroic man, a reliable man, a successful and beloved man. That Riley was scarred and damaged and from a poor background merely added to his magnificence: look what he had overcome! Even as a small boy riding on Riley’s broad shoulders Tom had felt the strength of him, and when he slid his fingers in among the black curls under Riley’s hat, and felt the strange roughness of the bare patches concealed there, he was not alarmed or repulsed. Riley published books by famous people, like Mr and Mrs Horrabin, Mr and Mrs Cole, and Mr Wells. When they came to dinner, talk was of policy and ideals, freedom and peace and education. Tom wasn’t very interested, but he was proud. Whereas his actual father. Well.
*
Since Julia’s death, Peter had hardly gone to London at all. Around 1923 he had moved into a slightly damp gamekeeper’s cottage beyond the woods, where there was a small bit of garden, and no immediate neighbours. Riley’s initial suspicion – that the cottage was a place for Peter to get as drunk as he needed without any interference – hadn’t proved to be the case. Around the same time Peter had quietly, of his own accord, stopped drinking, as he had stopped doing almost anything else. Sober, Peter was no more sociable. He had nothing to say, and didn’t listen. He didn’t want to go for a walk, or to listen to music, or to see the children. Gifts of books lay unopened, food stood uneaten, messages unanswered. As Peter’s responses shrivelled, so did Riley’s visits. Though always regular, they became short, safe, and practical: this needs a signature; about Mrs Joyce’s retirement pension arrangements; Tom must go to school/has measles/wants to take up shooting, did Peter have an opinion?
No.
Even this kind of topic, over the years, had shrunk away.
Still, though, Nadine or Rose would periodically throw up their hands and want things to be different – let’s take him for another round of doctors, perhaps they have discovered some new disease, some new test cure – vegetarianism, mentalism, psychotherapy. But Riley, Rose and Nadine all knew the horrible truth that you cannot give your life to trying to help someone who cannot help himself: whatever your effort, it won’t work. So they would remind each other that things could be much worse. P
eter is a bucket with a hole in it: don’t keep pouring stuff in – love, hope, attention – because it will just pour straight out again. Or, Peter is a sleeping dog; let him lie.
Kitty did not know this and it could not be explained to her. She was old enough now to go about on her own, and recently Riley had seen her wandering down in the general direction of the cottage, clutching a careful bunch of bright, shiny, sticky-looking buttercups, holding them out in front of her. We all have the right to our own mistakes, Riley thought, even seven-year-olds, and how else do they learn? And perhaps I am wrong, and she will redeem him, or at least awaken him, in some way, like little Annie Ainsworth did me … talking of which, he needed to send her a shilling for her birthday.
But he was wary.
Well, they were going to be here most of the summer: rebellious Tom, sweet Kitty, and the realistic adults.
In view of the refusal and the buttercups, Riley thought that perhaps it was time once again to disturb the bond of silence into which he and his friend had fallen.
*
The room was the same as it had been since 1923, tidy and spare: a chair, a desk, a clock. On the mantelpiece, incongruous in a glass milk bottle, was the lanky bunch of buttercups. Riley saw how it would have been: Peter having no vase, Kitty embarrassed for him, and for herself for not having realised that he wouldn’t, and determinedly putting it right by finding the milk bottle and making that the vase.
Peter moved very slowly, and smelt of bachelor and seclusion, of tweeds and tobacco. He made courteous moves, offering tea and a seat to his guest.
So. Riley felt a twist of nerves in his solar plexus as he spoke. ‘I can’t help wondering,’ he said, ‘if you’re going to come out of this. Ever.’
Peter smiled into his tea at Riley’s question. ‘So,’ he said. ‘No small talk.’
‘No,’ said Riley.
‘I thought I might,’ Peter said. ‘After ten years. That’s how long it took Odysseus, you remember – but that was one year for each year of his war, which for me meant I should have been through it by 1922 – and the thought didn’t occur to me till 1925. So the equation was wrong.’
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