The Heroes' Welcome (29 page)

Good God, Riley, after all you’ve lived through, you can certainly survive a couple of children landing on you. Winning the peace, for all of us. Go on. This – taking on Tom and Kitty – is what is needed, just as much as education, and reconstructive surgery, and Hinchcliffe to have a purpose, and every lost soldier a gravestone, and Ermleigh not to lose his job. In the Spartan Phalanx, each man used his shield to protect not himself, but the next man along – and the work continues. The work continues.

And there’s Christmas, and there’s a funeral to go to.

*

Christmas was all right, but the funeral, of course, was terrible.

Mrs Orris had tried to take charge from the off. First she wanted Julia buried at Froxfield. Then she wanted her buried in her wedding dress. She was angry with them all for having Christmas in London and not inviting her. Then she said she washed her hands of the whole affair. Then she came to stay at Locke Hill, and then she left without telling anyone. Then she came back.

Nadine said, ‘We must be patient with her. She’s lost her daughter.’

‘Yes, now there’s nobody for her to be so absolutely foul to,’ said Rose, and Nadine snorted with laughter which turned into tears.

Mrs Orris challenged Peter’s choice of hymns; she wanted ‘Onward, Christian Soldiers’.

Peter had laughed in her face, and said: ‘Madam? Over my dead body. He chose ‘Come Down, O Love Divine’, and two utterly obscure, deeply sad seventeenth-century ones which nobody knew. Rose persuaded him to drop one of them for ‘Jerusalem’. Then Mrs Orris wanted to read a poem. Peter agreed she should. But the one she wanted to read was a sentimental horror which everybody else thought half-witted. She insisted. She telephoned the printer on Christmas Eve – Riley’s printer, Mr Owen – and put it on the order of service, and changed the typeface without asking anyone, so the lines no longer fitted properly, and she was so rude and bossy about this that a situation developed, with Mr Owen blaming Riley, and the new pamphlets being late after all. And then she announced that there would be full mourning, for everybody, without consulting Peter, and nobody had full mourning, and there was no cloth to be had to make any up, and anyway no time, it was Christmas, it was mad, everything was closed …

Peter rescinded the order, and Mrs Orris declared that nobody had loved Julia except for her.

Then she wanted to read the letters of condolence people had written to Peter. He hadn’t read them himself. He pushed the bundle towards her. ‘Have them!’ he said. ‘Read them, eat them, make a hat of them. As you wish.’

Rose, of all people, had been the one to lose her temper with her. There had been a huge silent fight about whether or not the children should attend. Nadine was still not letting Kitty out of her sight, or her arms: Kitty had to go. So how could Tom not?

Mrs Orris said she would have them all arrested if they tried to force this young innocent to attend his mother’s funeral; it was disgusting, she said, just the sort of indecent suggestion she would expect from her reprobate son-in-law, a man without any kind of morals at all, just the type one would expect to lose his self-control at the first sign of trouble, even the Army had sent him home …

Peter said, in his polite manner, ‘Well, next time, Jane, perhaps you’d like to join up? You could scare a Hun to death just by appearing—’ and left the room, rolling his eyes.

This was when Rose took her firmly, physically, by the overpadded shoulders, and shouted into her face that this was a decorated and wounded war hero, the backbone of the British Army, the man to whom they all owed the fact they still had heads on their shoulders and furthermore the father of the grandchildren she presumably expected to see again in her lifetime – and
furthermore
a man who had lost his wife and was left alone with two children to bring up.

And then she felt absolutely terrible for abusing this woman, this older woman, who had lost her daughter.

Nadine said, ‘Nobody’s forcing anybody. Harding could perhaps take Tom for a walk.’

And when the day came, it was the wettest and most miserable kind of English winter day: light for only a few hours, and you could hardly call it light anyway. Kitty had colic. The train was delayed so people were late, among them Peter’s mother, who appeared like the ghost of the old century, frail and worried in a crinoline and bonnet, Scottish mists settled into the folds of her shawl. In a church full of prurient neighbours, shocked and buttoned-up friends from long ago, sniffing relatives, and individuals weeping repressedly for some other bereavement of their own, only the doctor cried all the way through.

‘Afraid we’re going to sue him for incompetence, no doubt,’ Peter said loudly, afterwards, sitting on his father’s grave with Kitty in his arms, smoking, smiling his bitter smile, and declining to come home for the wake.

But he’s holding Kitty!
Nadine thought.
That’s good.

*

And that was the end of 1919. Cold dingy weather, hypocrisy and misunderstanding lurking, all a year older, a year further away from it all. One woman down, one new girl entered, otherwise the same group in the same house. They were all, some despite themselves, aware of the symbolic power of the passing year, and the passing decade. And each was thinking, in their various ways, as they cuddled their teddy, caught each other’s eyes, raised the glasses of sherry which seemed a decent substitute for champagne in this time of mourning, but early, because Lord knows nobody wanted to stay up till midnight,
thank God that’s over.

Locke Hill, August 1927

Time passed. It had no choice. As various people felt it worth saying, during the war, after the war, at Julia’s funeral, in the weeks and months afterwards, Life Goes On. Riley Purefoy, thirty-one years old, sitting in the Leinster Arms after work one high summer evening, sipping a pint of half and half through his brass straw, heard someone say it at the next table.

It does, it does.
Its doing so had been on his mind. It was ten years since his war had finished.
Do I feel safe yet? Am I still afraid? What do I fear?

He feared that Tom and Kitty might be taken from them – that Mrs Orris might decide to cause more trouble, or Peter recover, and want the children. What if Peter were to die? He had wondered if he and Nadine should try formally to adopt them, but when he had brought it up, she had said no. ‘They have their father, flawed as he is. We can love them and keep them, but blood is blood. It’s not so much about him having them, as them having him.’

It was, he felt, unsettled.
But then things
are
unsettled. It’s their nature. Whatever we may think is going on.

He feared that nothing would ever happen to them again. More often, that fear was a hope. Occasionally he would say to her, ‘What about the motorbike, Nadine? Weren’t you going to have a motorbike and tour the world?’ and she would laugh and say, ‘Oh yes, I’m going to, you on the pillion, Tom and Kitty strapped to the handlebars.’ Or, ‘I have my world here, sweetheart.’ Or, ‘Plenty of time.’

Did he fear that he and Nadine would never have their own children? He thought not. They had ceremonially and rather gleefully thrown the rubber thing on the bedroom fire in 1926, but nothing had happened yet. They were going to give it another six months before thinking about seeing a doctor. Nadine had relaxed into the combination of art and children with great grace and a good nanny, involving the children and retreating as she wished, unburdened by a complex sense of responsibility. When she was with them she was with them. When she was working she was working. She’d made a studio in the glassed-in verandah on the back of the house. A gap between children suited her. He didn’t fear for her, or for the children they might or might not have. They were still only thirty-one years old.

He stood up. He had promised to take Tom for a quick game of two-man cricket in the park.

When he came in, Nadine and Rose were in the drawing room, sewing, deep in one of their interminable conversations. Rose was full of plumbing and child mortality rates. ‘What point is there being a doctor,’ she was saying, ‘when you’re just clearing up incidences of illnesses which with proper plumbing would not occur in the first place? It’s like being a road sweeper in a town without rubbish bins.’

Nadine enquired after various young patients by name: she ran a drawing club in Rose’s waiting room on Thursday afternoons after school. When Kitty bounced into the room, she joined in the chat, drawing club being her favourite. Conversation moved on to whether or not it was too late for Little Tea that day, i.e. tea using the dolls’ blue willow-pattern tea set, with slices of toast made from the tiny Hovis loaves, and slices of fairy cake cut as if the fairy cake were a full-sized cake, and the tiny pot of jam that Rose had brought back from her breakfast at the hotel in Switzerland for the children. Kitty suggested that Dr Aunt Rose should come with her into the back garden to see if the quails had laid, because if so they could make tiny fried eggs, and it could be Little High Tea.

Looking at these beautiful, beautiful women, Riley thought:
Never take anything for granted.

*

Crossing the road to Kensington Gardens, cricket bat in hand, Tom, eleven years old, whip-thin, white-haired, blue eyes narrowed, made a declaration: he would no longer go on holiday to Locke Hill.

‘Why not?’ Riley asked.

‘Because of
that man
.’

‘Which man?’ Riley, ever protective, asked.

‘That
father
.’

Riley said nothing, letting Tom proceed – which he did, wary but determined.

‘I don’t want him,’ he said, glancing up to check for reaction. He received none, just Riley’s quiet presence.

‘I’ve been thinking about it,’ Tom said. ‘You wheel me down there and I’m always polite, but he doesn’t want me, that’s clear enough. You know it’s true! I’ve had enough of all these parents who are no good and dead and so forth. I’d rather it was all kept simple. You’re my father and Nadine is my mother. I may change my name. I hope you think that’s fair. Because I have to insist.’

How bold his look!
Riley thought.
But can I blame him?
Actually, he rather admired him for it.

‘It’s absurd,’ Tom said, ‘to have parents who aren’t even actually there. Even if they are there. Of course, Mummy can’t help being dead, but she wasn’t even there before she was dead.’

‘What do you mean, old boy?’ Riley said.

‘Going away without saying,’ Tom said. ‘Or crying at Daddy. And Daddy not wanting her. And then too much hugging.’

Riley had to do some quick maths –
How old had he been? Three, when his mother died? And people think children don’t notice things …
He couldn’t fault the memory.
That weeping, pestering woman, tricksy and difficult, always dragging at the boy.

‘I know I’m meant to love them,’ Tom said, looking up at him. His face was white and tense. ‘But I don’t! I think they are hateful, weak, unpleasant, unreliable and treacherous. And I might as well say so.’

This boy will never be rosy and merry
,
Riley thought, and he was about to speak when Tom, suddenly shocked at his own forthrightness, burst out: ‘Sorry, sir,’ and turned and ran off. Riley watched him, the small figure clomping across the grass in his brown lace-ups, beneath the flat under-surface of the plane tree branches. After a few hundred yards the boy sat down swiftly, up against one of the piebald trunks, and hunched over.

*

People said ‘Life Goes On’ to Tom as well. Chaps’ parents, at school, usually, or beaks. He had developed his own response. ‘Death goes on too, you know,’ he would say. Quite politely.

He was muttering it now, sitting in the pilot’s seat of his Gotha. Also,
la mort continue,
and
la morte continua
,
mortus continuat,
and
der Tod whatever goes on is in German.
When he ever met a foreigner, which wasn’t often, he asked them to give the phrase in their language. What he really wanted was a Russian. When he wanted to think with fondness of his father, he would recall that Peter had written it out for him in Greek, both Greek letters and phonetic. But he longer wanted to think fondly of his father.

Tom was allowing Kitty, seven years old, pink cheeked, fluffy looking, stubborn, to perch in the forward cockpit: a rusty upright cylinder on whose rim, long ago, a German machine gun had swivelled and shot its fire through the night skies. The bottom was soft with leaf mould and worms, so she sort of stood and leant and wriggled, while Tom was an emperor in the remains of the pilot’s throne, with the remains of the controls before him, no longer dangling, because he, Tom Locke, had fixed them up. He had found the plane years before. In the course of a picnic, aged five or so, he had run away, scampering through incipient bluebells and old rotting conkers, and there it was. He had thought it was a ruin, overgrown with brambles, knee-deep in sludge and the knotty brown roots of ferns. But when he banged on it a deadened clunk sounded, as if the ruin wanted to let loose a loud and glorious clang but couldn’t. He had climbed on a fallen tree and seen a long body with two flattened and broken wings: an iron dragonfly of massive proportions. Three big circular holes appeared along the top, into which a boy might climb. He had climbed. In front of him, controls: rusting, falling. He had reached out, closed his eyes and stared ahead, and felt the thrum of engines, and the void below, and the wide massive skies above. In the years since, he had measured it, surveyed it, identified it, run away to it, hid in it, counted the rivets on its blunt nose, dug underneath it in search of its wheels, put his foot through its rusty panels, attempted to fix the big oily bundles of engine that lay stranded among its broken wing struts. But he had never told anybody about it. Even Riley might say, It’s dangerous, don’t go there. Or, It’s not yours, leave it alone.
But someone must know it’s there. You’d notice, if a plane fell out of the sky. They must all know.
But that first time, he was sure, no one had been there – there were no footprints, nothing was disturbed.
But
someone
must have been there. Unless they had jumped out with parachutes.
He had always secretly thought:
They might be there still. There might be skeletons.