The Heroes’ Welcome

Locke Hill, Sidcup, March–April 1919

After the wedding Peter, Tom and Rose returned to Locke Hill. Max the red setter ran up, tail floating, and put his nose in Tom’s face. Tom stood on the drive while his father opened the front door; then he stood in the hall, by a jug of white jonquils, while Peter, tall, slender, still in his overcoat, hurried through to his study. He watched Julia, his mother, shimmy down the stairs and across the hall.

‘Darling!’ she cried, to Peter’s back. ‘It’s roast beef! What luxury! Will you eat with us? Or – I suppose you’re tired – Mrs Joyce has made Yorkshire pudding?’

She stopped at the dark, polished door of his study, which had fallen shut. All was silent.

‘I could bring your tray,’ she said. She was wearing lipstick. Tom watched her. He was nearly three years old and had been living with his grandmother and the nursemaid Margaret in another house; he didn’t know why. At Christmas he had been brought here; he didn’t know why. Now Eliza looked after him, and everything he wanted and needed was in the power of this Mummy and this Daddy, who he didn’t know, but who he understood were the important ones.

He went and stood by Julia, uncertainly.

‘Or if you prefer I could coddle you an egg …’ Julia called gaily, fresh and nervous. ‘Or …’ Her chalk-white face stretched immobile and expressionless, and her blue eyes shone, wide and terrified. Tom didn’t know why her face didn’t move the way other faces did.

The jonquils smelt beautiful. All winter Julia had been bringing up hyacinth bulbs in glass jars from the cellar – ‘heavenly smell, isn’t it?’ – or finding the first narcissi, or a sprig of early blossom from the orchard wall, and taking them in to Peter. Occasionally Tom, imitating her, would take a flower, and give it to Julia, or Nadine. They would say, ‘Thank you, darling.’

Nadine had not come back after the wedding. Tom had not known why she and Riley were living in his father’s house in the first place, any more than he knew why he had not been, or why Nadine and Riley had not come back. He did not know what the war was, nor how even if people had a home they did not always feel capable of going there. Of the webs that had bound these adults together over the past years he knew nothing. That his father had been Riley’s commanding officer; that Riley had carried his father back from No Man’s Land; that Rose had nursed Riley; that Riley had deserted Nadine; that Julia had comforted Nadine and offered her a home. He knew that they were tangled up with each other, but he knew only with a child’s aeonic instincts, not as information.

And he knew that though Julia was called Mummy and smelt right, she behaved wrong, and so it was best to go and sit with whoever was consistently kind. That was Nadine. He had liked to sit curled up against her, and when Riley came to sit there too, he didn’t make Tom go away.

Riley’s face had something in common with Julia’s, this much Tom saw, in that neither face moved with ease. But few faces were easy to read. His father’s eyes were pale and rich, grey-shadowed, with most to give and most to lose. They switched on and off like a lamp; you wanted their kind look, but you couldn’t trust it at all. Mrs Joyce, the cook-housekeeper, had an occasional expression of concentration it would be foolhardy to approach. Eliza, his nursemaid, had a sleepy, empty face. But his mother’s eyes lied like the tiny waves on the beach washing in four different directions, her skin made no sense, and her eyebrows were not made of hair but of tiny painted strokes which did not come off. He’d tried, once, with a hanky and lick, like his grandmother used to do to his cheeks when they were going somewhere. His mother had brushed him off. Nadine’s face was easiest: it had a warmth which Tom liked looking at. And so he was sad that she had not returned.

Julia’s sufferings during the war had been extreme, and exacerbated by the fact that from the outside they seemed the result of folly and vanity. Throughout those years she had tried to maintain her marriage by investing in the only thing about herself which had ever been valued by others: her blonde and luxuriant beauty. During that time Julia’s mother had taken Tom away, ‘for his own good’. By the end, lonely, neurotic, deserted, Julia had become unbalanced, and had inflicted on herself a misconceived chemical facial treatment, which she had deluded herself into believing would ensure her husband’s happiness. This had stripped and flayed her complexion into a scarlet fury, making it frightening and unreadable to a child – to her child, when he was brought back. He was scared of her, and she was scared of him. Now, by spring, her face had faded to a streaked waxy pallor. It was not unlike the make-up the girls in town were wearing, and the ghost of beauty appeared unreliably in her bones and in the smoothness. Meanwhile her painted mouth uttered the over-emphasised banalities with which she tried to make up for … everything. Her blue eyes shone wide and terrified. She had spent four years of war preparing for her husband’s return; four years of concentrated compacted nervous obsession with loveliness, comfort and order, for his benefit. She had utterly failed.

Even now she tried to give him treats all the time, like a cat dragging in dead bird after dead bird, laying them at the feet of an indifferent Caesar. The flowers. Dressing too smart for dinner at home. Snatching cushions out from behind his head to plump them up and make him ‘more comfortable’. He was not comfortable.

There was a fire in the sitting room. Tom went in there, and sat on the edge of the pale sofa where Riley and Nadine had usually sat. By habit he did not go on it, because he wanted it to be free for either of them. But they were gone now.

Until Christmas, when Riley and Peter had turned up unannounced in the middle of the night, Tom had not known any men. He was unaccustomed to affection, and at his grandmother’s house had sat quiet and dull with a wooden horse or a train, as instructed by whichever woman was in charge of him. When the grandmother had brought him to this house, and this father had appeared, at Christmas, Tom had felt a great and important slippage of relief inside himself: here it was, what had been missing. That the father periodically disappeared again, into the study, was not ideal, but Tom was a patient boy. The father was there. And Riley. Tom had lined up with these new people, the men, and Nadine, and Cousin Rose, as if they must be more reliable, kinder and stronger than the women he’d known so far. In this full house, he hoped he would find what had been missing.

Julia came in and held out her hand. Tom stood as he had been taught, and took it. She whispered down to him: ‘Come on, darling, let’s go and see if Daddy will come out and eat with us.’

Tom did not want to go. Daddy did not want anyone. That was why he had gone into his study. He didn’t know why Mummy didn’t understand something so simple. He wished Mummy would go behind her polished door, so that he, in the absence of Riley and Nadine, could go and sit in Max’s basket with him.

They approached the study. Julia smiled down at Tom as she knocked on the door. There was no response.

‘Well!’ she said and, almost shamed, she opened it.

Peter was sitting in his armchair, an old leathery thing, shiny with the polishing of ancestral buttocks in ancient tweed. He’d lit the lamp and was reading the paper, his long fingers holding the pages up and open. There was no fire, and the whisky glass beside him was already smeared.

‘Darling?’ she said.

‘Which darling?’ he said, not looking up.

‘You!’ she said. ‘Of course.’

‘Oh! I couldn’t tell. You call everybody darling.’ He moved the paper half an inch and glanced at her. ‘Well?’ he said, glittering.

She dropped Tom’s hand, and went away. The door swung shut behind her and so Tom stood there until Peter called him over, ruffled his white-blond hair and, finally, said, ‘Run along, old chap.’

Most days Julia worked herself up to try again.

‘Peter?’

A grunt.

‘There’s one thing I’ve been wondering about.’

A further, more defensive grunt.

‘It’s—’ from Julia, and at the same time from Peter: ‘Well, whatever it is, I’m sure it’s my fault.’

‘I wasn’t thinking about anything being … fault,’ she said.

Silence.

He had not looked up. It wasn’t the paper now, it was Homer. What might that mean? Why would he prefer to sit and read all day instead of being with us? Or going to the office like a proper man? It’s not as if he hasn’t read the Odyssey before …

His hair is looking thin.

He’s only thirty-three.

She let out a quick, exasperated sigh.

‘Peter darling, please listen to me.’

He turned, put down his book, looked up, and said, coldly and politely, with no tone of query in his voice, ‘What.’

Oh Peter!

‘I just want to know what happened!’ she burst out. ‘What happened to you?’

‘What happened?’ he said. He gave a little laugh of surprise. ‘Why, my dear, the Great War happened. Have you not heard about it? You might look it up. The Great War. The clue’s in the name. Now go away.’

She swallowed.

She still tuned his cello most days. He hadn’t looked at it since he’d been back. But he might.

He used to sing and make up little songs all the time. All the time! It was so sweet.

A few days later Julia knocked on Peter’s door again.

Go away,he thought. Go away.

‘What I was wondering,’ she said, loitering in his doorway, neither in nor out, ‘no, don’t say anything, please – I just … wanted to know what you thought.’

‘About?’ Peter said. He didn’t look up. Not out of unkindness, or lack of concern, but out of inability. Julia’s desperate goodwill tormented him – these constant interruptions – and then he was so foul to her – and her face – expressionless, taut, inhuman almost with those terribly human eyes glowing out – her face was a perpetual reproach. Look at her, he thought, though he couldn’t look at her.

‘I was wondering,’ she was saying, ‘about before the war …’