My Dear I Wanted to Tell You (15 page)

Chapter Thirteen

London, April 1917

‘Take him dancing,’ said Jean. ‘He’ll just want a bit of fun. That’s all they want. Fun and a drink and whatever they can get. Tell him to get some preservatives, or I’ll get some for you off my Georgie. I’ll do that anyway.’

She shoved the sacrilegious packet at Nadine surreptitiously in Chapel. Nadine had to take it or it would drop. She blushed scarlet and stuffed it into her apron pocket and sang loudly: ‘There is a green hill FAR a-a-way without a city wall.’
Why would a green hill have a city wall anyway? And if it meant outside the city wall, why not just say so? It still scanned.

She didn’t for one moment deny to any soldier or anyone else the right to fun and a drink and whatever they could get. It made
her
feel ill, that was all. All of London was dancing now – dancing like lunatics, lunch hour, after work, nightclubs, hotels, tea dances, church halls – to jazz bands and gramophones. Dixieland! There were Americans and black men on the streets of Soho, with trumpets and saxophones. A new edict went out from the ministry: wounded men were to stay in convalescent homes until they were fit for service again. They’d been having too much fun in the West End, and not getting better quickly enough.

So if all Jean wanted was a drink and a dance and whatever she could get then good for her, but all Nadine wanted after a shift with the dead and the dying and the damaged was to bury her head in Riley or, failing that, the thought of Riley.

His letters were mostly short and useless, but she knew why, and she knew what to do about it.
Hold on.
She wrote back full of jokes and affection, descriptions of the daffodils, a jolly meal, a bicycle trip, a training course. Nothing about the blood and the death. He knew she knew. She knew he knew. It was people who didn’t know, or who had blocked it out, that she couldn’t deal with. Her
mother
. . .

Last time she had gone home her father had been out and her mother had been lying on her
chaise-longue
wrapped in cashmere, reading a potboiler of modern psychological theory by Addington Bruce. She was on chapter twenty-three, ‘Sigmund Freud and Psychoanalysis’.

Jacqueline was determined to do something nice for Nadine, who deserved it. ‘I’ve been thinking,’ she said. ‘How are you for underwear?’

‘I’m fine, thank you, Mama. I had those nice combinations at Christmas.’

‘No, darling, I meant real underwear. Something pretty and nice.’

Nadine saw it moving in, like rain from the distance, and tensed in preparation.
It’s my afternoon away from the hospital, why must I spend it tense?

You know why. Because your mother is afraid you’ll never get married, because all the men are being killed – and I am growing coarse and unattractive in my habits.

‘You need cheering up,’ said Jacqueline. ‘And you need a little help – I know it is hard in wartime, but the things which were all right before the war, being a little relaxed and that could be beautiful, if we were a little lazy, you know,
laxitée . . .
’ she smiled at the memory of how Robert used to chide her for it, indulgently ‘. . . but you know that
laxitée
was born out of beauty and art and creating, not from, you know, neglecting a little the joys of being a woman . . .’

Apparently, it was better to lie around all day drinking champagne and talking about art in your peignoir than not to care about frilly drawers because you were on your feet nursing all day.

‘When we were relaxed, darling, we were always elegant.’

Whereas
I’m letting standards slip, and should go to a hairdresser . . .

Gradually what actually concerned Jacqueline emerged from the clouds of her amorphous, slightly insulting goodwill. She paused, regrouped, and advanced again.

‘Darling,’ she said. ‘I have been reading, and thinking.’

Nadine almost spat.
How lovely for you, Mother.

‘Darling, let me tell you. Don’t be angry. I think you have become
fixated
on Riley – no, listen. Because it is impossible to find a young man, it being wartime, you have fixated on the impossibility itself and chosen Riley, because he is the most impossible young man of all.’

Nadine stared.
Fixated! My dear, fixated!

‘Because you love your father so much, you are scared of the possibility of any young man dethroning your father in your eyes
. Therefore
you have fixated on an inferior young man, who never could.’

Really.

‘So, in order to grow up, you must to cast off your fixation with the inferior, impossible young man, and find a possible, superior young man . . .’

Nadine’s lips had pursed themselves.
Mother, Mother, why are you always telling yourself that things are good or bad when every human experience tells us that everything is both?

‘And do you have a superior young man in mind, Mama?’ she said eventually.

‘Oh, darling . . .’ For months Jacqueline had trailed superior young men through the drawing room on Sunday afternoons: polite, bewildered boys who had been Over There, self-satisfied little charmers with cushy posts at the ministry, bearing that peculiar news which was no news, those stock phrases. Nadine would run into the house and straight upstairs to see her father, and hide with him, talking of their own dear familiar nothings. Sometimes she sent nice VADs from the hospital (she didn’t dare send Jean) in her place, and indeed a couple of romances emerged, while she lured her father out to the pictures.

This had been her first visit home for weeks.

Nadine would love to flirt with them, dance with them, go to the new Harold Lloyd with them. She knew they needed it. But she could only give them morphine and lay damp cloths on their foreheads when they started plucking the sheets and talking to people who were not there. She had told her mother before that she had nothing else to give. She told her again.

‘You get time off, darling.’

‘I spend my hours off asleep.’

Jacqueline said: ‘Of course we all know the value of beauty sleep, but there is a limit to how much a girl needs.’

Nadine, who had been working double shifts for several weeks due to a nasty digestive bug that had been doing the rounds of both patients and nursing staff, and was sleeping on average five hours a night and only three for the past three nights, gave up the struggle. In tones as weary as her body, she said, ‘Sorry, Mother, but do you know I think I’d rather have a little nap now, instead of this conversation?’ and stood up, shaking a little, to leave.

‘Nadine,’ her mother snapped. ‘My husband – my
husband –
may be called up and sent to the front at any time. You might have a little respect for the fact that I am being
positive
and not just
moping
.’

Nadine turned back, and the shaking increased and ‘I am NOT moping!’ she screamed. ‘I am WORKING every hour God sends with men who DIE – so STOP TELLING ME TO HAVE FUN.’

Jacqueline was blinking. She looked as if she had been assaulted. ‘A little
respect
, Nadine,’ she said quietly.

‘Yes, Mother. That would be lovely.’

The words plopped like pebbles into mud.

The moment sat between them when they both realised they should and no doubt would apologise – but the urge to make it worse was strong in Nadine, itching at her fingers, her articulacy, her frustration. Unissued retorts lined up restlessly along her tongue.

Respect? For what? Your idiocy?

I could have slept this afternoon, instead of coming here for this. I wish I had.

No one is going to send Papa to the front, Mother. Oh, and by the way, he is my father as well as your husband, or hadn’t you noticed? Is he only your husband now?

And one of the retorts barged to the front and burst out: ‘The inferior young man, Mother, is fighting in France –
your
parents’ country. I’m
sorry
, Mother,’ she snapped. It was not the meant sorry: it was the nasty little sorry followed always by ‘but’ –
but I really can’t be expected to . . .
;
but this has gone on long enough
;
but I’m going to have to . . .
She couldn’t be bothered to find a but. She didn’t want to hurt her mother. She wanted to fall on her and weep.

‘I’ll see you soon,’ she said, and pecked Jacqueline on her still-shocked cheek, and left, the words of the flare-up circling her, like rooks above a nesting site.

‘Go away,’ she said to them.

She could go back to the Chelsea, and just lie on her little hard narrow bed in her little dark shared room and try to sleep . . . or she could lie in the park, to feel the grassy earth beneath her back and the air on her face . . . though then soldiers on leave would come and talk to her, with their desperate hunger. Sometimes she wished she
was
a trollop, so she could give those boys a moment of some kind of joy.

She’d just have to go to the cinema. There might be a Charlie Chaplin on at the Coronet. And at least they had stopped showing those horrible topicals, cheering Tommies setting off, grinning like loons and waving, fun fun fun at the recruiting station, and the Roll of Honour flicks, where floating head after floating head appeared, like decapitated ghosts, each labelled with – at the beginning – the name of his regiment and where he was serving, but now more likely what he had had shot off him and how he had died. And that bloody patriotic music . . . They
had
been fun at the start: waiting to see if someone you knew came on, and cheering when they did. But it seemed no one could stomach them any more. Either they knew about Over There, and were appalled, or they were doing that thing, that thing, behaving as if there was nothing special going on, two hundred miles south and across some water, no further than Birmingham, or Manchester, pretending it wasn’t real, unable to bear having the truth of it displayed in front of them. The fury flared up in her again.
If you really are so interested in the human psychological theories, Mama, instead of picking me apart, why don’t you study the lengths to which people are prepared to go not to see what is before their eyes? ‘My husband may have to go to the front.’ Really, Mama, we all know they’re desperate for men but I really don’t think they’ll be taking a fifty-five-year-old conductor who’s up for a knighthood for his patriotic fund-raising, and sending him out to the Salient.

And, Mother, though we never mention it and you pretend it isn’t true, my true love is there, he is there, he is there . . .

An idea sparked. Perhaps the reason her mother pretended Riley wasn’t Nadine’s true love was because she couldn’t bear her daughter to have a true love at the front, and Riley’s being at the front was something she couldn’t change, so instead she changed him being Nadine’s true love . . . Really she was just trying to protect Nadine. No. That was too convoluted to be true.

She crossed over into the park and turned west, glanced over to the Round Pond, and to where the pale green branches of the trees overhung the road behind Kensington Palace. ‘One little boot in front of the other, girl,’ she murmured to herself.

It was hard, sometimes, to imagine that so much time had passed. Exactly three years hanging on little more than one touch, one meeting, one kiss, letters. Three years in the clothes that make you who you are. Nursing VAD Waveney. Occasionally she would imagine what she would wear if she were not serving. Artistic gowns? Cycling suits, as a New Woman? Something practical in jersey? Huge short black petticoats and lace-up boots and the perky cap and Riley’s coat? Jasmine oil, and her hair down? What might she have known by now of love, if there had been no war? Her body ached for Riley. But how could she ache for something she had never had?

She came out again at Black Lion Gate. There across the road was Orme Square.

She crossed, and she walked into the special quiet of the lovely white stucco square, past the creamy kid-leather blooms on the magnolia in the little central garden, her feet taking the familiar route of childhood across the York-stone pavement, and she rang Sir Alfred’s bell.

Sir Alfred was in, said Mrs Briggs, who was quite pleased to see her. Messalina lolloped up cautiously, and put her forehead against Nadine’s waist. Nadine stroked her hard, silky brow, and gently pulled her long ears.

Sir Alfred was working. Nadine skipped up up up the flights of stairs. It had been a long time since she’d been here. A few more casualties of her war: visiting, painting.

Late-afternoon light and the oily lush smell of paint filled the studio. Sir Alfred was at his easel, his back to her. She couldn’t see what he was painting. Something small. More medieval romantic stroke-perfect heroes? She rather hoped not. Watching the movements of his arm, waiting for him to turn and notice her, she picked up a brush and stroked it against her face, as she had used to when she was little, loving the silky softness of sable, the tiny shiny chestnut tips, the delicacy, and the roughness of hog-bristle . . . Their different behaviour on canvas and paper, the combinations of combinations of materials and techniques, the inspirations, the opportunities for subtlety and beauty and experiment. Sir Alfred teaching her, calling Riley over to demonstrate a stroke – ‘He does it better than me, the little varmint!’ How she had liked both Riley’s skill and the clarity with which he put it to use. No fuss. One of the first things she’d liked about him. One of the many first things. The remembrance of what she had lost hit her suddenly in the belly.

As if he had heard the blow, Sir Alfred turned around, and broke into smiles at the sight of her. His embrace, beardy and dangerous of stains, was very welcome. She had a rush of her father – the older man looking up from his work, pleased to see you – and a swift lurch that she should not have been so harsh to her mother.

‘Dear girl,’ Sir Alfred said. ‘Dear girl. How very kind.’ He wiped his hands, rang for tea, asked for news.