The Heroes’ Welcome

‘Oh dear,’ he said. ‘Have you got one?’

‘Have you never noticed it?’

‘Tried not to,’ he said. ‘A bit of brain in a nurse is just the ticket, but not too much. It only makes them sad.’

‘No longer,’ she said. ‘It’s about, I hope, with your blessing, to make me very happy.’

‘Well,’ he said. ‘If we have to have lady doctors, I’m glad it’ll be you.’

‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘Sir.’

Since then, Further Correspondence had been large in her mind.

But when Peter had shouted at her, her response was not scientific or nursely at all. It was purely and deeply emotional.

It wasn’t so much the shouting. So he had become a man who shouted: it was very unpleasant, but men could be like that, she knew, she’d seen enough of it on the wards, and though it made it harder to love him as she had when he was a boy, he had been to war and therefore she accepted it. What upset her was the phrase ‘in his own house’. Rose had lived and stayed at Locke Hill since before the war, and throughout the uncertainties of the war years she had taken comfort in calling it home. But now the underlying message lay there like a crushed snail underfoot: she was the poor relation – which was sort of true – and she’d better mind her step. He had never said, or implied, any such thing before, ever – he had always been the kindest man, the funniest companion, most loving cousin …

When he said that – ‘in his own house’ and ‘some bloody woman’ – Rose felt slapped. She left the room, and went upstairs with her feet odd on the steps, and an aerated feeling in her arms. Peter, her generous sweet cousin, friend of her youth, companion of her heart – he would not – but he just had. He had. Hadn’t he?

And then she sat on her bed for a while, wondering if she was overreacting, and why she didn’t understand Peter at all any more, and what she could do to make things easier for him, and whether perhaps it was, well, not her fault,of course she was not responsible for what had happened at Loos, which seemed, really to be the beginning of where he started going wrong, not that he’d talked about it, but she’d seen the lists of the dead, and how many had been his men.

We cannot ever know, but that doesn’t mean we can’t help,she told herself. Don’t mind one thoughtless comment.

What was he thinking, to say that?

Oh, he wasn’t thinking. It was the drink talking.

But a man chooses to get drunk. Doesn’t he?

At least, he could choose not to. Couldn’t he?

But alongside her hurt impatience, she felt a deep, naked sympathy. There had been such suffering. And there was Tom, little white-haired, milk-skinned Tom with his furious eyes and his great silences, wandering the house, lurking in the hall by the elephant-foot umbrella stand, watching, growing, needing . . . He misses Nadine. She was so sweet with him.

Rose recalled, suddenly, a day when Tom had called Nadine ‘Mummy’. Julia had tried to laugh it off, and Nadine had been mortified, and Tom had not known what he had done wrong … Later Julia had said, ‘Well, it’s all in the genes, isn’t it? Clearly I’m going to be as foul a mother as my mother was. Girls like me shouldn’t have children,’ and Rose had wanted to slap her, and Julia had noticed and wept and gone and got Tom and carried him off into her dim bedroom and hugged him nearly to death when he had already forgotten all about it and just wanted to play with his ball.

Time is flying by and they are all suffering. There has been so much silence,and it is so hard to tell if it is the silence of healing rest, of peace and contemplation, or the silence of fear and loneliness, emptiness and pretending … Are they dying there behind their closed doors? Or dealing with it all in their own way, taking the time it takes?

Should I be doing something? Something else?

In a way, Peter being foul gives me permission to leave, if I get the scholarship. But in another way, it’s another reason why I have to stay with him. He’s so helpless he can’t even be nice.

But I want to go. I want to live my own life.

But—

Is it pride and nothing else, to want to stand around with the men, with my notes and my professional judgement, and have other people act on my instructions, when my family needs me here?

Then she told herself that this was their own storm, and would work itself out its own way, no matter how much she threw herself at the stone walls surrounding it. Then she told herself that it was selfish of her to want to leave – if she got the chance – when they were all so helpless. Then she told herself it was arrogant to think she could help by staying.Then she thought of Tom again, and asked herself, if I leave, I will create a vacuum, and who’s to say if either of them will be able to expand to fill it? And finally she said: Go to sleep, Rose. It’s not your fault. He’s not your husband. She’s not your wife. He’s not your son.

It was not, in the end, Peter’s outburst that made up her mind. It was the sight of a plucked, untrussed chicken on the kitchen table a few days later. Headless, footless, wing-tipless, pink and naked, it looked alarmingly like a dead baby, arms out, knees pulled up, splayed. Flesh and skin and bone. I know about flesh and skin and bone. I know how they work. I would rather work with them.

Bugger Peter, and bugger Julia,she thought, enjoying the language she’d picked up – only for mental use – from the men she’d been caring for. When the Further Correspondence comes, if I get the chance, I will be off. I will be off.

Chapter Four (#ulink_ae0fa1ec-eea2-59c4-a5f9-48e743a3c6ad)

Locke Hill, April 1919

What Peter had been thinking was what he was always thinking, one way or another: the phrases and repetitions that garlanded his dance with whisky, excusing and justifying on the one hand, denying and defying on the other.

He might have been thinking: Locke, you bastard. What a bastardly horrible thing to say to Rose, who has never done a thing wrong to you, who only cares about you, who has always looked after you. You really are a selfish nasty uncontrolled man. Why would she trust you? You’re not to be trusted by anyone. Just ask (and here the string of names and faces began again, and the tight gulpy feeling would start up in his chest as he slipped into the familiar routine) Burdock … Knightley … Atkins … Jones … Bloom, Bruce, Lovall … Hall, Green, Wester … Johnson, Taylor, Moles, Twyford … and Merritt … Half of them unburied … loss upon bitter loss. An armful of Atkins; Bloom’s head on his shoulder and Bloom’s arm round his neck, resting like a woman’s or a tired child’s. His own long-fingered hand white against Bloom’s hair, embracing the dead head to keep it from flopping … The warmth of the German boy’s body next to his in the shell hole … You were a lousy officer, Peter, and now you’re being a lousy civilian. It’s not surprising you’ve turned out to be a lush. Go on, lush. Have another drink. If you’re honest with yourself, Peter, don’t you see that the pain you’re feeling now is all you deserve? You’re probably causing all this pain on purpose so you can feel worse about everything. It’s all you’re good for … all you’re good for … makes no bloody difference …

Or he might have been thinking: Bloody woman! Bloody Rose, bossing me – and bloody Julia, too, upstairs in that bloody room stinking of woman, crying and blaming me for everything – some bloody Penelope she is to come home to – it’s not my bloody fault! Of course I want a bloody drink. What man wouldn’t want a bloody drink? You’d need a bloody drink to deal with all this – anyone would. You deserve a bloody drink …

Or it might have been: Rose, don’t go. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean that. Of course you belong in this house. You can stay here for ever. Of course you can – you must – dear Rose. Don’t leave me here alone with Julia, with her dead face and her blaming eyes, and that poor child who stares at me like some kind of Cyclops. Rose, come back and have a drink with me. Come on. Sit down, come on. It’ll be nice. Let’s just forget about everything for a moment – for a few hours …

Before the war, after Oxford – where he’d managed to stay on a few years as a junior fellow, teaching and so forth, which had suited him very well – Peter had been steered into the family firm with a view to learning the business. It had not agreed with him, and the moment his father died in 1914 he had left. It was his shame and his mother’s good intentions that had steered him back there in January 1919. He had bowed his head and taken it on: part of his punishment. He had failed in so many ways, due to his own unworthiness as much as the idiocy of his leaders. Well, he determined, if he wasn’t good enough to die with his men, and since the Army couldn’t wait to be rid of him, he would at least make a go of being all that was marvellous at Locke & Locke.

He started on a dull grey morning, late January 1919. There was a meeting to welcome him, and lunch. His father had left a very practical team: they had not on the whole had to fight; they were self-perpetuating; and they respected Peter, as major shareholder, scion of the family, officer. Nobody would tell him he could not have his corner office and the lunches they assumed he would want, once he had his balance back, which everyone thought they understood would take a little while.

There was a young man there who had been instructed to update him on developments and practices, to type his letters, to, what, keep an eye on him? Peter sent him away, and settled in to catch up.

He didn’t really like the look of his office. There was something oppressive about it, and the books seemed rather wrong on the shelves. The filing cabinets seemed very full, and he felt observed. He needed, he decided, to know exactly what was where. That would help him to feel at home, as it were. So he took every book and every file from the shelves and cabinets – that way he would know how far he’d got, and wouldn’t miss anything out – and he stacked them on the floor, and unpacked them, and began to read.

Uncle Eric, wheezy, blinking, and old, who had been running the show, came in to see how Peter was getting along. He found him sitting on the floor like a grasshopper, his long legs folded, knees up by his ears.

‘Not sure you really need to go through everything in every file,’ Uncle Eric said, mildly. There were only a couple of other men in the office who had served. Uncle Eric had not, and he was wary.

Peter looked up politely, and said, ‘Don’t you trust me, old man? Not allowed to read my own pa’s company papers, is that it?’

‘Not at all, not at all,’ his uncle responded, looking foolish and apologetic. ‘Just, well – you do as you think best, and come to me with any queries.’

And Peter did not press him. His uncle’s concerns were transparent. I am not trusted, Peter thought. My judgement and my capacities are doubted. They know I lost men over there – do they know that those men and I were like fingers on a hand? That I held my men’s lives in trust, and they mine, and they are dead, and I am not? Do these civilians have the slightest understanding of what that means? They have been told that I drink; they probably know I was dragged out of a low club by a better man than me.

I understand that.

I will prove them wrong.

In the month of his service he proved it by arriving earlier than everyone else each morning (which required the doorman to come in earlier to let him in, an extra three-and-a-half hours’ pay per week); staying later (requiring the doorman to stay late, at variable cost and annoyance to his wife, depending); and by refusing the lunches where he might, with the charm and intelligence they recalled from before the war, have been useful with potential customers. His main project was to refile everything in the recent archive according to a new system of his own. Putting the ledgers and legal notebooks and jute files of thin silverleaf paper into the right places seemed to him honourable work, and it made him feel safe – well, not safe. One is never safe in this world . . . But there was a small joy in it. Of course the oldest should be on the bottom and the newest on the top. It made sense! He had read about an ancient Chinese system where the position of items in a household or workplace had an effect on the fortune and spirits of the inhabitants and workers … he didn’t go so far as to believe in it, but of course the new must lie on top of the old! It’s how the planet is built, how history works, layer upon layer. It was morally and aesthetically wrong to put the new things at the back of the file. We are going forward towards Utopia after all, not harking back to Arcadia! Arcadia kills you, because it prevents you progressing into your own future. Odysseus knew that, when he made them tie him to the mast while the Sirens sang – you know what the Sirens sang of? The story of the Trojan War, of the fallen heroes whom Odysseus knew so well. Backwards looking. And the only way Odysseus and his men could get their boat to keep moving towards home was to block out those Siren songs of the past, of the war – which was its own kind of Arcadia, and love of which would keep a man from Ithaca for ever … and Odysseus had to listen to it all, all the corpses and the blood, and get past it.

So my filing system is right.

‘Do you know what his name means?’ he asked his uncle.

‘Whose name?’

‘Odysseus,’ said Peter.

‘No,’ said his uncle.