The Heroes' Welcome (26 page)

She said thank you, not knowing what else to say.

‘And you, Mrs Purefoy?’

‘I’m all right,’ she lied.
Half left.
‘Shocked.’ She let go a huge sigh. ‘Shocked.’
Do babies feel the shock of the person in whose arms they are? She’s so near my heart …

‘You were a nursing member of the VAD, weren’t you?’ Dr Tayle was saying. ‘Do you feel capable of dealing with the situation, for the moment?’

She did, and said so, but the doctor did not want to leave her. He seemed indecisive. Flustered, almost.

‘Have a cup of tea, doctor,’ she said. ‘Or a glass of sherry. It’s a terrible shock for everybody.’

He nodded.

‘It must be best to leave them for now,’ she said. ‘My husband is on his way, and will speak to Peter. Mrs Joyce has taken Tom into town.’
Was she repeating herself? ‘
No upset is required,’ she said. ‘Please allow my husband to speak to the police later if he thinks it necessary. There is not the slightest danger.’ She fixed her eyes on the doctor’s quite firmly. No lunatic specialists, no policemen, were going to barge in here to upset Tom and shred Peter even further, just because he needed to sit with his dead wife in the garden.

It had all been perfectly usual. Nothing. The only oddness was that they were outside.
Had she gone there? Run there in panic? Had Peter taken her?

It’s very odd. All of it. Oddest of all that a person could just die, of nothing. And that another person could take her poor body out into the garden and lie it there. And just sit. That too is so odd. Is that what happened?

‘He was upset and he carried her body outside. That’s all,’ she said. ‘Give him a little peace.’ And in that moment she knew that if he did not, she herself would explode in some way; would hit him or shriek or make some wild accusation that would see him removed –
He has to leave now.

‘Are we agreed?’ she said.

The doctor left. He said he would be back in a few hours.

*

Peter sat out there, and time suspended. He accepted nothing, not even a cup of tea.

After standing at the French windows for half an hour, staring at him, Nadine had a realisation. Julia’s words came back to her: none of us can do this on our own.

She went over to the sideboard and poured two large whiskies. She put on several coats, Kitty tucked inside the layers, then picked up the glasses, and just went and stood on the lawn beside them. She was not going to just look at them through glass in their odd tableau: Julia like Ophelia, her little white foot poking out on the icy grass, the lace on the clean nightgown they had given her after the birth spread at the cuff and throat like frozen sea surf on the lawn, and at the hem like rotting, frothing weed; Peter, sitting, in his heavy coat, smoking, one knee up, one leg out – with all the lazy elegance of a soldier on a war memorial, ruined, beautiful, his long hands fluttering in the dull winter light as he lit cigarette after cigarette. She belonged with them.

*

He was whispering.

She squatted down beside him to hear.

He looked up at her, his eyes so pale and so cold.

‘I suppose I killed her?’ he said, very very quietly.

‘No!’ she said. ‘No, you didn’t!’

His eyes were disbelieving.

‘Go away,’ he said.

‘No,’ she said, gently.

She took up her previous post.

*

She was still standing there when she felt Riley’s hand on her shoulder, his arm around her. ‘Go inside,’ he said. ‘You’re cold. Make me a cup of tea, would you?’

‘Have you told Rose?’ Nadine whispered, as he unfroze her with his touch.

‘She’s on her way,’ he said. ‘Go on. Go in.’

I love you.

*

Tom and Eliza were making up the fire in Peter’s study (view to the north, other side of the house from the lawn). He handed her logs, with due awareness of his own importance.

‘I put the dog in the shed,’ Mrs Joyce said, and indeed now she mentioned it, Nadine recalled hearing some low howling.

‘Riley is here,’ said Nadine. ‘So I am going to make some tea. Tom, will you come and help me?’

The baby was still tucked into her shawl. Nadine wanted to know where everybody was. That they were all right. Though they weren’t.

Mrs Joyce looked questioning.

‘Riley is here,’ Nadine said again, as if that answered all questions. Then, ‘Where is Millie?’

‘Upstairs,’ said Mrs Joyce. ‘I told her Mrs Locke has – had an accident. She’s upset. Best thing. Out of the way.’

‘And the maternity nurse? Was she not asked for for today?’

‘Yes, Mrs Purefoy, we expected her this morning.’

‘Can you speak to her? I will, if you wish.’

‘Between us we’ll do, Mrs Purefoy.’

‘We will. Thank you, Mrs Joyce. Oh! Harker?’

‘He wanted to chop some more firewood,’ Mrs Joyce said. Their eyes met and for the first time Nadine felt that she would cry.

She went and put the kettle on the hob. There were the arrowroot biscuits. She took one from the tin with the picture of the rocking horse on the lid, and gave it to Tom, and her eyes settled on him.

Do I wait for Peter to tell this boy his mother is dead? Will Peter be able to?

Do I have to tell him?

Do I tell him now?

Riley had told her a phrase of Peter’s, about children knowing nothing of innocence; of how you only recognise it when it leaves you. Eliza had put Tom in his sailor suit, and he looked absurdly sweet.

Is he going to hate his sister now? Will he see her as his mother’s murderer? Or his father? If … is there any way out of this?

She was suddenly lividly angry. It had been going to be all right! They had been smiling at each other! Things had been better!
There’s this beautiful baby, oh, Christ …

She said to Tom, ‘Hop up on the table, sweetheart,’ and he did.

Rose could tell him!

She sat next to him.

‘We’re not normally allowed to sit on the table,’ he said.

‘Today’s not a normal day,’ she said.

‘Why?’ he asked.

‘It’s a very sad day.’

‘Why?’

She put her arm round him and realised she was holding him too tight.

‘Why?’

Damn it, Rose can do it. Rose is practically his aunt.

‘Is it Mummy and Daddy in the garden?’ he said, and for a moment it seemed her stomach slipped out of her body …
This is where I slaughter innocence
,
she thought.
This is where I watch it die.

All right, then …

She said, ‘Did you see them?’

‘I’m going to see them again,’ he said, and slipped off the table and started towards the drawing room.

‘No!’ she shouted, but then –
but then
.

Do we still do what is expected? What has always been done? Or what it might be better to do?

Do we look back, or forwards?

‘I’ll come with you,’ she said, and she took his hand.

*

They walked out together across the lawn, damp now and dull. Riley was sitting with Peter, both smoking. Riley was talking softly. When Tom dropped Nadine’s hand and trotted straight over to his mother, the men looked up, paralysed as it were, with surprise.

‘Tom!’ Riley exclaimed, and looked round, and Nadine was there, and Peter looked up and round, with one of his beautiful beatific smiles, his blue eyes light.

‘Poor Mummy,’ Tom said. ‘She’s got blood.’

‘Tom,’ Nadine said gently. ‘Darling,’ and she put herself close to him, and touched his arm.

‘Nadine!’ Riley said, and she made an arm-lifting what-could-I-do gesture, a gesture of
I’m not in charge, I can’t prevent, I can’t control …

She knelt by Tom.

‘Is she asleep?’ he said, and Nadine took her breath, and looking at Peter, and then back to Tom, she said gently, ‘Darling, your mummy is dead.’ Peter blinked softly at her, his eyes kind.

‘Like the bullfinch?’ Tom said.

‘Yes.’

‘No more flying?’

‘No more nothing, darling. Her soul has gone to heaven.’

‘Where’s heaven?’

‘Somewhere we can’t go, until we die.’

‘But I want her.’

‘Sit with her now,’ said Nadine. ‘With your father. Sit with her and say goodbye. Then in a few days we will have a special sad party for her body, to say goodbye to it, and then her soul will go to heaven.’

‘I don’t want it to,’ Tom said, dry-eyed.

‘We have no choice, darling.’

Silence.

‘We have no choice,’ she said again.

Before anyone could say anything more, Tom burst through the vanguard of his father and Riley, jostling their coats and their knees and their adulthood, and flung himself to the ground. He patted his mother’s hair, kissed her cheek. ‘She’s too cold!’ he said, angrily – and at just that moment, a noise behind them – it was Rose, a Gladstone bag dropped on the terrace, rushing down the lawn.

Tom jumped up. ‘Rose!’ he shouted. ‘They’re going to put Mummy in a hole in the ground like the bullfinch and I don’t want them to!’ – and Rose was weeping and weeping, floods of tears.

Tom stared at the ground. All around him were the dead matches of the men’s cigarettes.

‘For God’s sake, get him out of here!’ Peter shouted. ‘Everybody just go away!’

Locke Hill and London, December 1919

There followed a period of confusion which afterwards none of them could recall clearly. Rose’s furious determination to get Peter inside. Riley’s quiet conviction that he should be left alone. Nadine’s desire to take Tom and Kitty away. Tom’s equally profound desire to lie down by his mother and make her wake up. Kitty waking, finally, and mewling like a bird inside Nadine’s shawl. Peter sitting, smoking, ignoring it all, looking at Julia. Julia lying there.

Rose finally said everyone should go away and leave her with her cousin. Riley picked Tom up, kicking and yelling, and held him very close and tight and safe as he carried him up the lawn. Very soon Tom subsided, and Riley put his hand over the back of the boy’s head as he sobbed against his shoulder. Nadine walked beside them, her hand gently on her husband’s back.

So then Rose could go and sit across from Peter, and call his name gently.

He looked up, his eyelids drooping, exhausted.

She had been going to speak softly to him, to be kind and strong and sensible, but she didn’t. She just wept. How utterly she had failed them both.
How utterly. After all. The moment I leave. As soon as I made the break – and look at us now.

After a while he held his hand out to her, and she took it.

‘I killed her,’ he said.

‘I don’t think you did,’ she said.

‘I thought I did,’ he said.

‘I don’t think so.’

They were too far apart to hold hands for long, arms stretched out. They let them drop.

‘Go on in,’ he said, and she looked at him, and she went.

She spent the next fifteen minutes in her room, howling: for him, for Julia, for everything. Among the things she howled for was the fact that now she could never leave him. She would now stay here for ever, looking after him and the children. The future she had imagined was exploding in her face. She didn’t berate herself for having dared to imagine a different life, a free life – her
own
life. She just recognised the truth. The woman is needed by the man – the sick man – and the children. Goodbye, medicine. Goodbye, independence.

Then she went back out to sit with him some more.

*

The maternity nurse, Harding, had arrived, young, cheerful, appalled, calm. Eliza had said she was very sorry but … and run away. Millie was in the kitchen, crying. Harker had retreated to his room, and came out only to speak occasionally in a low voice with Mrs Joyce. Peter was still in the garden. Riley was talking to someone on the telephone. Rose had come in again and kept swallowing and walking round in circles, her chest heaving quick and shallow. Nadine wished she would sit down, or go and rest. For herself, Nadine just wanted to lie down with Riley and the baby and weep.

He came and sat with her on the sofa, and for a moment it wasn’t clear which of them was going to subside against the other. In the end they both did, and sat in silence together, hands entwined, shoulder to shoulder, heads together in the beautiful closeness.

‘What did you say to him?’ she asked. ‘Outside?’

‘Nothing,’ Riley said. ‘I can’t say anything to him. He was talking about Odysseus and Penelope and – Tiresias? I couldn’t follow him.’

‘Tiresias was the prophet, I think, who Odysseus went to find in the Underworld. When he met all the dead heroes from the battle of Troy.’

‘Oh, Christ.’

Mrs Joyce called him. He was wanted on the telephone again.

*

Nadine was feeding Kitty, staring into her great eyes.
Poor Julia
,
she thought,
not to have the joy of this. Poor poor Julia.

And were my mother and I ever like this? Did I gaze at her with great big eyes?

She sat, baby in the crook of her arm, the bottle in her hand, being stared at across the room by Tom. His eyes were narrow under his little cap, his small tie like a noose around his neck.

‘Come here to me,’ she said, but Tom did not slip to her side with the same ease as he used to the winter before.

‘Come on,’ she said. ‘It’s only me.’ He came, and sat stiff and thin beside her. Nadine could see his eyes closing over, as if layers of ice had solidified between him and the world.

*

Riley was out with Peter again. They didn’t seem to be talking.

*

At dusk, Peter was alone out there. He stood up and stretched his long arms and let out a firm deep breath. He raised his head and shouted: ‘Come on, then!’

Riley had been waiting for it. He went out – and found Harker coming from the shed, dragging behind him a stretcher knocked up from a tarpaulin and two poles. Riley looked down at it.

‘The Boers, sir,’ Harker said sadly. ‘Spion Kop.’ Riley glanced at him, and nodded.

They lifted her on to the stretcher as best they could. Cold and rigor mortis prevented much movement, but Peter had laid her out beautifully earlier. They spread her nightdress clumsily and covered her with a blanket, and carried her upstairs to the bedroom.