The Heroes' Welcome (21 page)

Walking home (
home! Which was home?
), he thought about it all. There was, of course, another way to make her family house
their
home – children. At some stage no doubt he would find he had got her with child.
That sounds very biblical. Get her pregnant just sounds vulgar. What is the polite term?
It didn’t matter that he didn’t know. He wasn’t exactly going to be talking about it to anyone. But yes, fathering a child seemed pretty manly, something to be proud of. Something, more to the point, that nobody else could do for him. But he did not bring up the matter of a baby. He knew nothing about babies. How long it was meant to take, or – anything.
And there’s another pamphlet! ‘All About Fatherhood, for the Newly Married Man’.

All this was the kind of thing he would have been able to talk to Ainsworth about.
He had a letter from Sybil: ‘We had some grand Walking Days in the summer. Little Annie says she is going to join the Band and the character of the lass is such I believe she will, whether they will have her or not. The Sadness is never far away but there’s too much to be done to think about that. We raise a prayer to him each Sunday, and to you, and Annie says to be remembered to you. And by the way – there was talk of a lad from London being involved in the trouble here when you were visiting last. He answered your description, though I’ve no doubt you’ve too much sense to get involved in anything ridiculous, so it must have been some other facially injured lad up from London heading to the station that dinnertime. Let’s hope he’s the sense to keep his damaged head out of hot water the next time.’

Sybil’s voice seemed like one of comfort, from long ago. There was no reason why it should, but it did.
I’ll go and see them again
,
he thought,
one of these days
.

*

A few days later, as they were going to bed, Nadine said to him: ‘About the future. I’ve been thinking. I think I will go to art school. You’ve inspired me by commissioning me.’

He was very pleased. This was to do with them, their future, not the past.

‘You don’t mind?’ she asked.

A tricky question, as it tends to lead to ‘why would I mind?’ which immediately sounds defensive. But then,
why would I mind?

‘Why would I mind?’ he said.

‘You might want me to stay at home and have babies,’ she said.

‘Well, I do want you to stay at home and have babies,’ he said.

‘When?’ she said, smiling.

‘When they come,’ he said, with a little frown.

‘You do know where they come from, don’t you?’

‘Yes, thank you,’ he said, with very mild
faux
outrage.

She put her hand over her mouth for a second, laughing or covering embarrassment, he didn’t know.
What’s she doing?

‘What is it?’ he said.

‘Darling,’ she said. ‘I’ve been being very modern and I hope you don’t mind.’

‘What?’ he said.

‘I’ve been reading both Marie Stopes and Annie Besant.’

This meant nothing to him.

With the expression of one making a leap, and blushing scarlet, she said: ‘I’ve acquired a diaphragm.’

‘We all have diaphragms,’ he said. ‘You’ve had one all your life.’

‘Oh, Riley!’ she exclaimed, and she went into the bathroom, and came out with a little bag. Inside it was a little box. Inside that was a rubber thing, circular, mysterious, important. He gazed at it, perplexed.

‘It’s a contraceptive,’ she said, almost giggling. ‘You don’t have to worry about it. I do it. But I want you to know about it.’

‘Blimey,’ he said.

‘I haven’t used it yet,’ she said. ‘But it means we can have our babies whenever we want, and I think perhaps not yet. What do you think?’

‘Blimey,’ he said. Then, ‘But you do want some in the end?’

‘Certainly,’ she said. ‘Lovely little curly babies. But I want more of just us first. Not Papa all the time, not sadness, not work. Papa’s been invited to tour America. I’ve told him he must go. And I’m going to redecorate a bit. What colour shall we have the bedroom?’

‘I couldn’t care less,’ he said, with a smile.

‘Marvellous,’ she said. ‘And can we go dancing? I won’t mind if you want to wear your scarf – I could get you a lovely silk one – but I’d love to go dancing. Hear the music and hold you in my arms. All that.’

‘Blimey,’ he said.
How many times can you fall in love with the same person?

Locke Hill, October 1919

As it couldn’t matter less to Peter where he was, he stayed at Locke Hill. The comforts of home did comfort him. His study was there for him; his clothes, clean. He wasn’t sure what everyone was going to say to him, how much of a fuss they were going to kick up, or when, but for the moment they seemed pleased that he was there, and mostly engaged with Julia and the imminent baby. And Julia herself, vast now and oddly passive, smiled at him, was kind to him, left him alone. It was pleasant to have Nadine about when she came, and when Riley came down they took some walks together, quieter than ever. He was aware of these things, but they were not his world.

It took Odysseus ten years. I have not even had one.

His world was in his head, and in Homer. He read the
Iliad
, again, and then the
Odysse
y, again. He read the Greek alongside the dictionary alongside the Chapman, against the Dryden, and the Pope alongside the Cowper alongside the Greek, and the more recent translations. He read, all the time comparing what Achilles and Odysseus did, and what happened to them, with what he had been through in France, what he had seen and done, and what had been done to him. He found himself translating bits, here and there. Words which did not seem quite right to him –
well, of course they were right, but they were right for something else, somewhen else, for some other translator. For what he was thinking, now, they were not right. So much liberty a poet could take with the original! The chronological series of translations was like a pile of poems built on each other; like sedimentary geology.

Was Chapman a soldier? Had he any idea? Homer – or at least some of the many who contributed, who were parts of Homer – at least one of them was. How else could they know to use the same word for the giving way of a man’s legs with fear, in battle, and with lust, at the sight of Penelope in all her finery? And for Patroclus falling dead in battle and Achilles falling in grief by his body? How else could they understand?

He noticed that the word for truth meant, precisely, not forgotten.
A lethea
. Not in the Lethe, the river of forgetting.
Is that what the truth is? What you don’t forget? What does that mean? Well, for a start it means that everybody has a different truth …
He thought about Calypso, the sex maniac who kept Odysseus prisoner in her cave for seven years; he thought about how Odysseus, in disguise, testing his wife, felt so strongly for her grief as she wept over the husband she thought was dead, yet he kept his eyes dry as pieces of horn beneath his lids. He thought about trust, and how when the ships of Odysseus’ fleet moored in the safe-seeming inlet to sleep, every man aboard those ships was killed, and only Odysseus’ own ship survived, because Odysseus had moored outside: he had not trusted. He thought of the firestep, sentries, all night, awake. Of the modern ways he had used to keep awake: nightclubs, cocaine, prostitutes, jazz. And of the Sirens, who sang of the truth of the battlefield.

Truth itself a drug
, he thought,
an addiction. A man could lose his life after war to wanting and needing to know the truth of what happened. Harking on the past. Am I doing that? Or am I drowning the truth? It’s not that I don’t know what happened – I don’t understand. I don’t understand.

He would go to sleep and wake in a panic: he should not be sleeping. Bad things happen when officers fall asleep.

On the study sofa one afternoon, sleeping in the comparative safety of daylight, he was woken, just as the silvery autumn sky was turning to lead, by the cold point of a blade in the softest hollow of his throat. It was quite real. Lying, eyes closed, he knew that if he sat up suddenly and swiftly enough, his throat would be pierced, and death would be his. He moved his head gently, very gently, to and fro, to feel the sharpness against his skin. He thought it would be right, and a good way to end it.

In one movement he swung his arm across the blade, and he opened his eyes.
It’s nothing. There is nothing there. Here’s the truth: it’s all in your head.

*

Some neighbours, the Baxes, back from Yorkshire now the war was over, invited them to dinner. Of course he didn’t want to go, and actually neither did Julia, but because each felt that the other might like to, and because both knew that on some level it was a good idea, they ended up going.

Mr Bax was too old to have fought; his children too young. The other guests, a vicar and his wife, and an accountant and his sister, were of an age. Peter was next to Mrs Bax, who seemed to know a great deal about the peace terms, and where everybody was going wrong. She knew almost as much, indeed, as the vicar. The accountant was full of good information on stocks and bonds. Peter ate his chop and felt like a savage, and felt that surely he was not meant to be still feeling like a savage.

The vicar’s wife, courteous and intelligent, was keen to talk about the decline of civilisation. What future, she wondered, for religion and art?

‘Madam,’ Peter said, ‘you should know – you of all people are civilised, a civilian …’ He meant it kindly – he thought – but it came out oddly.

After dinner the vicar took to the piano, and there was singing. Very civilised! Mrs Bax, with her white throat and her generous embonpoint, took her place by the upright piano and, aware of Peter’s service record, made sure to keep the songs cheerful.

Peter was all right for ‘I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles’, and ‘A Pretty Girl is like a Melody’, and ‘By The Light of the Silvery Moon’. But when Mrs Bax started singing ‘How Ya Gonna Keep ’Em Down on the Farm (After They’ve Seen Paree)?’, feeling herself no doubt rather modern and bold with the lines about how ‘wine and women play the mischief/With a boy who’s loose with change’, he started laughing not with merriment but with a note of desperation, and the memory of Mabel at the Turquoisine, singing it so differently, so beautifully, with such profound understanding of why a boy needed that mischief and was helpless in the face of wine and women –
and oh, God, she sang it
on Julia’s birthday last year, which I forgot, one more tiny offence among so many – only last year. Jesus, must time go so slowly?

Perhaps Mrs Bax thought her choices too frivolous – anyway, she and the vicar changed their tune, and decided on ‘Roses of Picardy’, sweet yet respectful. And yet, when she sang, really quite beautifully, the lines about how the roses will die with the summertime, and our roads may be far apart, Peter started laughing again, laughing hard.

Mrs Bax stopped singing. The vicar lifted his hands from the keyboard.

It’s the same to them. It’s all the same. The silvery moon from before the war, the silvery dew from 1916, the wine playing mischief – it’s all just entertainment and civilisation. They know nothing. Phaeacians. They’re bloody Phaeacians.

‘Darling?’ Julia murmured.

Peter rolled his eyes sideways towards her in a kind of desperation.

‘Let Demodokos touch his harp no more,’ he said in a tone of resignation and finality. ‘His theme has not been pleasing to all here.’

So then they stared, like bullocks over a fence. Not unfriendly. Just uncomprehending. Rich tourists in the land of pain.

‘Well!’ said Mr Bax with hostly responsibility in mind. ‘The old songs still have their potency, I see!’

‘Old?’ said Peter. ‘Old? Are they so old? Is it all past, now? You want war songs? I have some!’

He stood up, and caught eyes with his wife, and her eyes were open, kind and loving. He was weeping, he realised, with a sense of idiocy and of letting everybody down, but they were not his world, so who cares?

Idiotes
: he who cares only for his own interests.

He raised his eyes to gaze around at them, and said: ‘The famous harpist sang, but the great Odysseus melted into tears … as a woman weeps, her arms flung round her darling husband, a man who fell in battle … she clings for dear life …’

He said it furiously and clearly, but he said it in Greek, and nobody, not even the vicar who might have been expected to, recognised it. Only Julia picked up the word ‘Odysseus’.

It seemed that the duty of pacifying him fell to the vicar, who stood up from the piano stool and said something calming and appropriate: ‘Now now, old man, no need to be angry,’ that sort of thing, in ecclesiastical tones … but Peter turned on him, and said, starkly: ‘You liked my fury well enough, didn’t you, when you thought the Hun was coming for you. You were happy to have my fury protect you then. Weren’t you? But now? Now, oh no. Now I’m to shut up and behave. Now you’re not afraid of the Hun any more, you’re afraid of
me—
’

The vicar’s wife flinched and blinked; Mr Bax bumbled to his feet, exchanging glances with the vicar, thinking about ringing for a manservant.

Julia, breathing lightly, went and stood beside Peter, very close.

‘I’m so
sorry
, Father,’ he was saying bitterly. ‘That I don’t just
slot back in.
Terribly inconvenient. I do understand.’

She put the size, the pure volume, of her body alongside him, touching. She put her hand on his shoulder and leant in, leaning a little of her weight and her breast on his back. It was a movement of trust. He turned his head sharply over his shoulder to look at her, profile to profile.

Everyone was staring at him.

Her eyes were clear and steady.

She leaned up, and kissed him, very softly, on his cheek. It felt to him – actually, physically felt to him – that every nerve ending was peeled raw. Her kiss was on skinned flesh. He thought:
I love you.
His mouth formed the words: ‘
s’agapo
’ – in Greek. And she smiled, because that was something he had taught her, in Venice, naked on a bed under a golden glass chandelier, with canal water reflections rippling on the vaulted ceiling.