by Louisa Young
Are you well, my love? Are you lonely? Any news from Rose? Or Peter? How is the dear dad? I think of you having your peaceful dinners without us, reading your papers undisturbed …
all my love to you both …
your Nadine
*
The children not being there was lovely and peaceful. The possibility of a pint with Hinchcliffe or a quiet dinner out with Peter, without the nagging feeling that Kitty would not be getting her goodnight kiss.
It had bothered him, when Nadine had brought up the matter of their ‘own’ baby again. He didn’t – he wasn’t – he didn’t know how to answer, beyond plain reassurances. He loved Tom and Kitty. Any doubts he’d had about taking them on had melted away in the strength of their need. And they were enough for him. If Nadine miraculously got pregnant – and the doctors seemed to think it would be miraculous – and yes, he could admit he did not want to have anything more than he had to with doctors – but if she did become pregnant, how would he feel about it?
God knows.
Terrified, probably. Haunted by that grotesque scene of Julia, dead in her nightdress, laid out on the icy lawn, Peter beside her, smoking, out of his mind with compounded grief. Remembering too being downstairs at home while his mother gave birth to his sisters, and to a stillborn brother, a few feet above him, just beyond the floorboards. No, he did not want Nadine to have to face any part of that danger, that fraught and terrific uncertainty, the ferocious play of hope and fear, let alone the drugs, the blood, the timescale, the effort – he didn’t want any of that anywhere near his tender, thin, waxen wife. Her soul had always seemed too big for her skeleton. How could she carry and build another whole body and soul inside her?
To be honest, he would have carried on using johnnies, or her rubber cap, to save them both from all that. But she was in charge of her cap, and when she threw it away he was in her hands. And when the doctor said that pregnancy was extremely unlikely, he was relieved. As was she. Or so she said.
*
After a couple of weeks he was going crazy with loneliness.
*
There was, though, one thing that he had to do while they were away. He’d put it off long enough.
In the smart, pale surgery in Harley Street (tall mirrors, white hydrangeas, magazines, a music-box full of sweets for the children), Harold Gillies was a different kind of surgeon to what he had been in 1917, when they were Captain Purefoy and Major Gillies at the Queen’s Hospital in Sidcup. The old wounded soldiers were not neglected, but Gillies had other kinds of patients now. He made new faces for civilians: the burnt industrial worker, the bus driver who had had the terrible crash, the cancerous, the ageing film stars with too many chins. As Riley went in, a small girl with a bandaged eye was coming out.
‘That’s Margaret,’ Gillies said. ‘Lovely girl. Just fixed her drooping eyelid with a bit of kangaroo tendon. She’s doing well.’
Riley sat down, across from him, over the leather-topped desk. He leaned forward a little and placed on it, carefully and respectfully, a small, shiny, greying pink object, arch-shaped and set with creamy teeth. Without this in place in his lower jaw, Riley could not really talk. The spluttery mess which came out of his collapsed mouth when he tried rendered him incoherent, and therefore silent by choice, under the circumstances. It all rather took him back, and as when a thirty-five-year-old sleeps in his old childhood bedroom and feels fourteen again, Riley found, sitting here jawless, that he reverted somewhat to what he had been, back then. Helpless, he thought. Bitter and scared.
‘Well,’ said Gillies, his tone changing. ‘Old chap.’
Riley heard the words and the change of tone, and decided that everything was for the worst. He knew it; had known it for a while. The pain. It had never hurt before, not like this, with no provocation. So, what, cancer? Something coming back to get him; some germ from the mud, some bacteria or mutation that had been lying in wait? He knew what it meant, and he had a mad, vivid thought: I shall have to kill myself.
Then, come on old man. Hold on a minute.
‘It’s lasted you very well,’ Gillies was saying.
Riley faded out.
‘Purefoy!’ – Gillies’ voice again, as hard and strict as it had ever been at Sidcup. The voice of authority and knowledge, the voice of the man who saved me, who hauled me back over the cliff-edge I’d already fallen off. The voice which wouldn’t let me go. Snap back, Riley
don’t want to. Not fucking going through any of that again
Snap back man
no
Riley!
Fuck off
He snapped back. God, he must have almost fainted.
Fainted! How very manly.
‘Would you like a glass of water?’ Gillies asked. Gillies knew. He has seen so many of us, he knows about us …
Riley would like a glass of water. He took out the etched brass straw that went everywhere with him, and twirled it, and when the girl in white appeared with the glass he put the straw into it and sucked, slowly, carefully. He wasn’t going to lose dignity in front of Gillies. Anyway, he was perfectly good at this by now.
‘As we know,’ Gillies was saying, ‘the type of splint you’ve been using doesn’t last forever.’
Do we know that? Riley thought. I must have missed that part. I don’t think I did know that.
‘To be straight, you’ve been pretty lucky to get away with it for so long …’
Have I?
‘… But you’ve looked after it well, in general …’
But?
He just looked at Gillies.
‘However, you’ve managed to crack it – look.’
Gillies picked the splint up. ‘See that?’ An almost invisible fracture ran across the bottom. Riley squinted at it. ‘That’s what’s been causing the pain,’ Gillies went on. ‘The edge has been rubbing and I’m afraid there’s some ulceration …’
Riley nodded wisely, peering.
‘If you’d come in earlier …’
Riley glanced up. I came, didn’t I?
Gillies grinned at him. ‘The splint is old and broken, there’s ulceration and a liability to infection. This old splint’s not going back in, that’s for sure. Your jaw has changed shape somewhat since you were twenty-two. Riley, this is the perfect opportunity for the osteochondral graft I should have given you in 1919.’
I’m not going back into any of that. Nope.
‘I know it’s not what you want to hear.’ He gazed at Riley kindly.
But I’m already back. Sitting with Major Gillies, being told about things to be done to me, with no choice about it.
Hang on – no, that’s nonsense.
This is my life. I don’t belong to the army like I did then. I am not that boy, so very out of his depth, traumatised as the head doctors say, shellshocked – was I? God, I don’t know – anyway, I’m not him, and I’m not there, and I’m not then. I’m a grown man, thirty years old. With a wife. And children. And ageing parents, and two sisters (one unmarried, the other married to a spiv – secure? I shouldn’t think so), and a fatherin-law who’s beginning, to be frank, to go a bit gaga. And with a company to run, and employees.
Yes, you’re really going to kill yourself, aren’t you Riley?
‘Riley?’
I can’t go through all that again. I could hardly do it when I was out of my mind on war; how can I do it now that I am sane and happy and normal?
‘We’re much better at it now. It will be much simpler. We can take the piece of rib, your own rib, give you an Esser inlay, which would allow a solid rank of dentures … Riley?’
Riley looked up.
‘Hear me out,’ said Gillies. There was no trace of New Zealand left in his accent at all, Riley noticed. He was balder, as well, though hair was never his strong point. Things change. How has my jaw changed? Regressed, disintegrated, deteriorated, fallen apart, rotted? He thought about Jarvis, with the little horsehair stitch at the bridge of his new nose, to keep it narrow. Well
Christ, of course horsehair would deteriorate over fifteen years … But that’s all right, you don’t need stitches once things are healed up. I’ve been healed up for years! Me and my – he stared at the pink thing on the desk, his companion, his sine qua non, part of him but not. Vulcanite? It’s a kind of rubber … He thought about bicycle tyres and the soles of shoes, ten years old. He wanted to move his jaw gently, very gently, side to side, but without the splint in the flesh it just hung there, empty. Nobody saw him without it. He was not a vain man. Quite the opposite. He didn’t like attention.
‘The skin is good,’ Gillies was saying. ‘It can take another bout of surgery. There’d be no flap this time, no pedicles. Our techniques are vastly better than they were. Pain relief, anaesthesia, antisepsis, all transformed. You won’t be my guinea pig …’
There was a pause.
I wouldn’t have had any life at all, were it not for this man.
Riley remembered the boy – what was his name? – who had injected his leg with paraffin wax, to get those ulcers, to get sent home, and ended up with some carcinoma. You seek to save, and in the seeking it turns out you destroy.
Riley leaned forward, picked up the splint, opened his mouth and started the procedure: let your jaw hang, relaxed. Left side in first, then crook your finger into the right-hand corner of your mouth to pull it wide to let the right side in, don’t choke, mind the ulcerated bit, find the peg on the stub of the left ramus, position, and on the right ditto, position, pulling the mouth opening from side to side as required to make room. Then both forefingers in at once, to the back, to knock it down into place. Bite down. Find some saliva, to ease the discomfort. Not so much you dribble.
‘No,’ he said, now his mouth was back to normal, and could speak.
‘Riley—’
‘By all means treat the ulcer,’ Riley said. ‘And I would appreciate a new splint. But no. No. No.’ He smiled politely. ‘No,’ he said. ‘No thank you.’
*
As he left, heading down to Oxford Street to get the bus, Riley had in his mind a phrase that he had spotted once in somebody else’s notes at Sidcup: ‘Refusal not considered reasonable.’ He knew Gillies hated that he wouldn’t let him finish the job. But it’s my head. It’s not unreasonable to not want your head dismantled again.
He was not going to tell Nadine about this. Certainly they told each other everything, but that didn’t mean telling each other every stage of everything, when it might make the other unhappy, Unnecessarily.
So you’re worrying about upsetting her and thinking about killing yourself, simultaneously? He laughed at that. Good old self-mockery.
It felt very strange. Such similar emotions to those of ten years ago. But so different now.
He settled into a corner seat, and gazed out at the limp, thick green leaves in Hyde Park, great pompoms of trees with the parkland beneath them wide and golden like a savannah.
*
‘So that was all a grand success?’ Riley asked, when they came home, sunburnt, lugging bags of polenta.
‘Did you miss us?’ cried Kitty, embracing his middle.
‘Hello darling,’ said Nadine, shining at him, removing Kitty, and hugging him, her arms inside his jacket, as if they were still nineteen. Tom grinned at him from across the room.
‘Rose is coming to dinner,’ Riley said. ‘I knew you wouldn’t mind.’
Within days, it was as if they had never been away. Only of course it wasn’t.
Chapter Four
South of Rome, 1928
Aldo, on a train rattling south the day after the English left, considered the cousins from London, and their visit. Inviting them had been an experiment, of course. He half expected individuals from perfidious Albion to be as perfidious as their rulers, those arrogant old men who had denied Italy justice at Versailles, keeping from her territories which had been promised and for which he, Aldo, had shed his blood and got slight frostbite of the toes. But he was a modern man. He knew well enough that you do not judge somebody by where they come from. That kind of campanlismo, that loyalty to your own town’s belltower, is what keeps the world in the dark ages. My bell rings wide and clear across the world, he thought with a little smile, and the thought pleased him. In fact he was pleased overall. The warmth and beauty of the English cousins pleased him; their willingness to come was itself an honour and a declaration of their faith in him and in Italy, but more than that – he liked them, and they liked him and his family.
Did Nadine look at all like his mother? No. To be honest, no. The hair, of course … He smiled. English family! Her husband must be very fair indeed, though. Those children are not in the least like her. They’re as blond as the ones St Agostino saw when he first went to England and declared them non Anglii, sed angeli; not Anglos, but angels.
He had been thinking, since his darling mother had died, about something she said to him once. He had expressed, years ago, an interest in synagogue and shul; other children went, other families, why not them? And she had explained: ‘To your grandmother, and her generation, religion holds you together; to your father, religion holds you back.’
Well, Aldo wasn’t interested in religion, but he was interested in holding together. And in religion as a cultural thing. He was now in a position, as a free and prospering Italian in the twentieth century, to reconsider on his own terms some aspects of it that his father had had to throw off in the interests of leaving the ghetto. For example, he could invite his relatives from another country. He had beds for them to sleep in, food to feed them. He had the freedom to treat them properly, as a man should, a cousin and a host. They don’t know so many things, he thought. He had watched their ignorance with some fascination. Food, for example. They were so surprised to see Aldo cooking, and knew nothing of ordinary food.
‘We don’t have nice food at home,’ Kitty had said, but when Nenna had asked why not it elicited a look from the boy to the little girl meaning ‘Stop’. The little girl had stopped. She looked as if she always did.
‘English food is less of a fuss than Italian,’ Tom had said, and so Aldo had put it down to English pride, and watched amused as they encountered pasta and fried artichokes and tiny fried fish and creamy melting mozzarella. Tom liked to stand by Aldo, Susanna, and Ilaria, the family’s servant, learning. He was, he said, going to make lasagne and cannelloni and polenta, for his father. Nenna told Aldo that the boy planned to fill his suitcase with pecorino romano and mozzarella and tomato seeds to grow at home in a greenhouse. Susanna offered to write down for him the recipe for the little fried cakes they called ears, crunchy and sweet and delicious. Well, all children like them, Aldo thought, and instructed Ilaria to make them every day during the visit. The boy didn’t seem to think his father would want them though, and declined the recipe.
And then, today, on their last day, there had been a bit of a fuss. It turned out the boy had bought mozzarella to take home, and when Nadine had said that it wouldn’t travel, Tom had gone off to Campo dei Fiori and found a man who would sell him a buffalo calf. He was halfway to making a deal for it when Aldo caught up with him and was able, laughing and teasing, to talk him out of it.
How sweet, youngsters, with their unexpected wisdom and then their complete ignorance! Though to be honest how could a child be expected to know that you can’t take a calf on a train in England?
Sweet cousins, sweet extension of family, the coming together.
It was not that Aldo had forgotten his father’s stories, and his grandparents’. Far from it. The past dwelt constantly in the low foothills of his consciousness, and occasionally wandered into active consideration. Even sixty years after it had come about, he was delighted, every day, by the unification of the various states of the peninsula into one Italy. He had a trunkful of suffering and chaos, like any man. He remembered perfectly well what the ghetto had been like before the handsome yellow apartment blocks and the noble new synagogue were built on the site; and those memories were why he was now an engineer and
not just a musician, as what he thought of as the Lesser Aldo would have preferred. The new Italy did not need guitar players. It needed roads and irrigation systems, railways and sturdy housing. He remembered perfectly families in rags eight to a room, when babies died regularly and mothers died at forty-five. The smell of people trying to live decently with practically nothing. The sound made by a grown man who has fought over a fishbone and failed to win it. The ghetto’s gates had been opened before he was born, but by no means all its inhabitants had found their way out through them. Many never would. His father’s flight meant Aldo had been born to freedom. Others of his father’s generation and of his own were still stuck. To them freedom meant danger, and only the ghetto was safe. He pitied them. And he despised them, a little, for not taking hold of the opportunity they’d been offered, for not stepping out into the sunlight.