The Heroes' Welcome (32 page)

Not much, really.

He had been walking for a couple of hours. The sky was beginning to burn, glowing. The day was heavy with insects and the beauty of late summer. Out here in the middle of nowhere he took his shirt off, and didn’t even notice that he kept the silk handerchief round his neck, as always, something to cover his face if he – or someone else – needed it.

Bringing Peter in then, that day. July the first. Could he remember that? Tripping on roots of trees no longer there. Brambles full of dead men. Jessop shooting Dowland as he ran away, a desperate zigzagging rabbit. The revetting in the German trench.

Riley suddenly pitched himself down onto the turf of the field-side path, flattening his back against the solid ground, and stared up: leaves, sky, space beyond.
It’s all right. You belong. Remind yourself: I cannot do without the infinite, nor the infinite without me.

He pounded the earth beside him gently, hopelessly, with his fists. The same chill earth – follow its surface, south and east, down the cliffs, under the sea, through the floundered lands to where the unfuneralled corpses lay, organised or in shattles, making earth. Edward Thomas’ among them.
And Jack Ainsworth’s, and …
stop it. That’s a Charybdis to pull you in and down …

There’s some link
, he thought. Nature growing out of the bodies of our ancestors. Those rocks in Wiltshire, sarsens, just lying about in the fields, propped up three thousand years ago at Avebury and Stonehenge, broken to build burial mounds, barrows and barns and houses. The Valley of Dry Bones, outside Marlborough. His mind ran along the surface again, west, past London, up alongside the slow Thames a while, along the Roman road, the A4, cobbles beneath tarmac, chalk beneath cobbles. Bones. Tiny tiny flowers. The hillside where he and Nadine had first made love.

And this little moment during which we are here, to see it all, as if we were separate from it, before becoming part of it again, bones and loam and air and leaves of grass. Like poets walking and talking together all the July day, and into the English dusk.

I’m not a poet. I can’t even talk clearly.

He lay there.

I’m not having it
,
he thought.
I’m not fucking having it.
He jumped up, pulled his shirt on, turned back.

*

He went striding down the path, through the dark dry trees. He paused a second on the doorstep, then walked in without knocking. Peter was still in the chair, doing nothing.

‘Sir,’ Riley said, in his soft, intense voice.

‘What are you talking about, Purefoy?’ Peter said, frowning slightly. ‘What do you mean, “sir”?’

‘I know a bit of the
Odyssey
, sir. I read it because of you. Not in Greek. But I read it – like Julia did, because of you. You know where it says we’re worn-out husks, with dry haggard spirits always brooding over our wanderings, our hearts never lifting with any joy, because we’ve suffered far too much.
You remember that bit, sir?’

‘Yes,’ said Peter. ‘It’s what Circe told him.’

‘Yes, and she was fucking right, sir,’ Riley said. ‘Excuse my French.’ He was staring. He swallowed, his curious gulping little swallow.

‘Come come, Riley,’ Peter said, and Riley said: ‘No. Shut up. For all you’re so quiet, sir, I know what it sounds like inside your head. I know you think you’ll collapse if you acknowledge … anything … and collapsing
just isn’t done.
Think you’d be letting everyone down. But you said I was in charge, sir so …’

Peter wasn’t looking at him. He sat like a schoolboy.

‘I need you,’ Riley said. ‘I need your help. I can’t fucking bear this, not to put too fine a point on it. I need you, for example, to come to the pub, sir, with me and Hinchcliffe and Ermleigh. We go every Thursday, some of the lads come along – Burgess turned up a few weeks ago, he’s an orderly now at St Mary’s Paddington; you’d never believe it. Jarvis comes sometimes – don’t think you knew him, sir, he was with me at the Queen’s. He’s been working for eight years in a cinema, projectionist, so that nobody has to see his face. There’s some lads I knew when I was a boy …’
Lost friendships. Friendships which should have been and never came to be.
‘We have a few and we talk about the old days. Also.’ He swallowed again. This was a long speech for him.
I can swallow. Gratitude.

The room was so quiet, so still.

In for a penny …

‘Also,’ he said. ‘I need you to write me a book about Homer and the war. All your
Iliad
and
Odyssey
stuff. You’ve done all the research. We could publish next year for the tenth anniversary of the peace. It’s been ten years, sir. Ten years ago this month I was walking out of Passchendaele – August twenty-first! Ten years – and every soldier I passed saved my life, sir,’ – Riley’s eyes were full now and he began to stumble – ‘everyone who said, Keep your chin up, pal – don’t lie down! – Lucky sod, that’s a Blighty one – Oh, Lord, there’s a pushload already on this train, lad, but I’ll squeeze you in – Mind if I prop you in the broom cupboard – then your cousin Rose, sir – Major Gillies – Captain Fry – Nurse Blackie – Mr Tonks – Lady Scott – and then Sir Alfred – Nadine. There was Ferdinand, sir, praying at the wire. Couch, in the mud, three feet from the top of the ladder. Dowland, running back, and his brother with no legs – Captain Jessop who shot Dowland. Baker – do you remember Baker? Injected paraffin wax into his leg, died of cancer a year later – Bloom, Hall, Johnson, and Atkins, Lovall, Burdock, Knightley, Bruce, Jones. Green and Wester, Taylor and Moles, and Twyford. And Merritt
…
and everyone. Captain Harper.’ He gulped. Captain Harper,
flying across the sky like a whirling sunflower before shattering into a flaming shell crater
—

‘Ainsworth,’ he said. ‘You, sir—’

He stopped. Coughed and swallowed. ‘Some are dead, sir, and some are not. All right? You are not fucking dead. There’s three things, sir, you’re going to do for me. You’re coming to the pub, you’re writing me a fucking book and you’re coming to France where we are going to sit on Jack Ainsworth’s grave and cry like fucking babies. You’re going to do it because I need to do it and I’m not doing it alone and you and I are not separate, sir. We’re not separate things, sir. We’re the same fucking thing, sir. You’re coming with me.’

Riley was incoherent by the end, but Peter began to understand him. He stood up.

Ypres, September 1927

The two of them went. Jarvis and Ermleigh weren’t up to it. Hinchcliffe got shy. Burgess said, Yeah, thanks, I don’t think so. They didn’t invite anyone else. So Purefoy and Locke walked alone at two in the morning, while Ypres slept around them.

It was the same, but it was different. The streets were silent, and cleaner. The cathedral was rising, half-formed, where they had last seen it in ruins. Scaffolding and piles of stone stood where rubble and detritus had been. There were plenty of prefabs, damp-looking, occupied. The Cloth Hall, as ruined as it had ever been, still stuck its two blackened fingers in the air. And ahead of them loomed the great new white arch at the Menin Gate, the biggest headstone of them all, glowing slightly. They walked on towards it, sober, clean and together.

A vast golden moon was rising, and they looked at it, with its skeins of cloud and ‘who, me?’ face. Nobody else was there, and they were grateful for that. They did not want to be part of the show for the visitors; the sorrowing mothers, the never-got-over-it widows, the disbelievers hoping still to find their missing man, the bare-faced vultures and grief tourists. A few candles in jars stood around, along the base of the walls, their flames and shadows flickering. An owl hooted softly, somewhere out over the flat darkness to the east. A miasma hung over it, and dampness rose.

Purefoy held up their lantern; Locke lit a cigarette and looked away, out of town, down the Menin Road towards the past.

‘Do you suppose it’s still muddy?’ he said.

Purefoy said he should think so.

‘I wonder if the trenches have all fallen in.’

Purefoy thought not.

‘I suppose we can go and look at them,’ Locke said.

‘Larks!’ said Purefoy.

‘German ones, too. They’re open to the public.’

‘Well, we’ve both seen the inside of a German trench before,’ said Purefoy.

‘Not at leisure,’ Locke observed, and took a last drag, and dropped his stub.

Purefoy’s face was tight. Thousands and thousands of men, under the sky, in the mud, unburied, unwashed, unprayed for, unfound. Hundreds of thousands, under the sky.

We held the shit in common. It’s right to hold the getting over it in common.

Peter’s look was long and clear, into the darkness.

‘You suggested I wasn’t dead,’ he said. ‘What makes you so sure?’

Riley snorted softly. ‘Empirical evidence, sir,’ he said. ‘The rats haven’t eaten you.’

‘Hmph!’

‘But also – you haven’t been exactly alive. You never expected to come home alive. And so you never have.’

‘Oh,’ said Peter. Then, ‘Achilles’ hair …’

‘Heel?’

‘No, hair. He promised it as an offering to a river god, Sperkheios, for his safe return. But when Patroclus fell, he cut it and put it in Patroclus’ hands.’

‘Because he didn’t care any more if he got home or not.’

‘Mm,’ said Peter. Then he said, ‘But I didn’t lose my Patroclus.’

Riley smiled. ‘Oh, we’re all Patroclus, sir. We lost ourselves and each other.’

Peter thought about that. Then he said: ‘Drop that “sir” rubbish, would you?’

‘Force of habit,’ said Riley. ‘Something in the air.’

‘Ghosts of rotting friends in the air,’ said Peter.

‘My jaw,’ said Riley. ‘Out there somewhere.’

‘But not your heart.’

‘Nope. That’s right here. Thumping.’

Silence.

‘Lend it to me sometimes?’

‘Any time you like, Locke, old boy.’

Peter smiled.

*

They looked at the names by lamplight. Hundreds of them. Thousands of them. They went on and on. Some names they knew, and many many more that they didn’t. Riley choked at the sight of them. Yards and yards of names, tidy and clean in the stone. He put his finger on one or two. He pulled his coat collar round against the wind, and lit a cigarette.

After a while Peter said, ‘Coffee?’

‘Mm,’ said Riley.

‘Madame said she’d leave a pot on the stove for us. And to wake her if we needed anything.’

‘Did she? That was kind.’

‘Wasn’t it?’

They didn’t want to leave.

‘Should we not do something?’

‘Something symbolic, you mean?’

‘Mm.’

They stood in silence for a while, the two of them silhouetted, tiny under the great white arch, gazing out into the black night. Silently each man’s mind ran, yet again, through his own list of names, faces, moments.

Locke was still leaning against the cold white marble wall, in the dark. Very quietly he began to whistle the ‘Last Post’. It’s a difficult tune and he couldn’t make all the high notes, but it served its purpose.

My thanks to

Vanessa Branson, Robert Devereux, Charlotte Horton, Jacqueline Shave, Emily Young, Simon Browne-Wilkinson, Michele Lovric and Chris ‘Mr Bennet’ Geering, RIP, and his daughters Sophy and Lucy, in whose houses I have written this book.

To my dear agents, old and new:

Derek Johns, Natasha Fairweather, Linda Shaughnessy and St John Donald,

and to my editor Katie Espiner for her most acceptable faith in me as a viable project.

To Sarah Chew for the title

and to Isabel Adomakoh Young, former co-author, perpetual first reader.

I would also like to acknowledge my debt to Jonathan Shay, MD, PhD, Staff Psychiatrist with the US Department of Veterans Affairs, for his books
Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character
and
Odysseus in America: Combat Trauma and the Trials of Homecoming
, two of the most interesting books on war, damage and literature that I have read, and of great inspiration to this book and to its predecessor,
My Dear, I Wanted to Tell You
.

And I acknowledge the permission of A P Watt
at
United Agents on behalf of the Trustees of the Robert Graves Copyright Trust.

Louisa Young was born in London and read history at Trinity College, Cambridge. She lives in London with her daughter, with whom she co-wrote the best-selling
Lionboy
trilogy, and is the author of eleven previous books including the bestselling novel
My Dear, I Wanted to Tell You
, which was shortlisted for the Costa Novel Award and the Wellcome Book Prize, a Richard and Judy Book Club choice, and the first ever winner of the Galaxy Audiobook of the Year.

My Dear, I Wanted to Tell You

Baby Love

Desiring Cairo

Tree of Pearls

The Book of the Heart

A Great Task of Happiness: The Life of Kathleen Scott