My Dear I Wanted to Tell You
- -
- 100%
- +
The land now outside the window was green. Oh, God, it does all still exist. Sheep. Leaves.
You will, at some stage, if you live, have to go back, Purefoy, where there are sheep and leaves and Sunday lunches. You will have to go back into it and not be brutal.
Can you bear that in mind? Is there any room for that?
When he reached his billet in Amiens, the stairs confused him, and the sheets on the bed seemed alien. He wrote a letter to Sir Alfred: short, and to the point. Then he lay down on top of the alien sheets, carefully, his boots still on, and stared up at the ceiling, following the line of its moulding round and round.
*
It seemed the rush of enthusiasm that had rendered Purefoy a Second Lieutenant had been premature. Recruitment had not, after all, declined quite as had been feared, and there was, after all, no shortage of young men of education who could be called Second Lieutenants and released to the Western Front. Also, someone, somewhere, had decided that in the interests of social stability officers promoted from the ranks should not go back to the men they had served alongside. ‘In other words,’ he wrote to his parents, ‘they don’t know what to do with me.’ So he was given leave.
Second Lieutenant Purefoy sat on a single bed in a room above a pub in Dover. He was going to London. He would visit his mother and father and his sisters . . . God, his sweet little sisters. He wanted to send them a picture postcard right now, a funny dog in a tartan costume, with a monocle, or something, but then they’d know he was in Blighty . . . oh, I can’t go home . . . but I’ve got to . . . and I’ll see Sir Alfred and Mrs Briggs. For a split second, before memory caught up and kicked him, he found himself thinking that he might visit Terence.
He tried to picture his family and friends in London. He assumed they still existed. After all, here was a single bed in a room above a pub in Dover.
What the fuck could he say to any of them?
Well, there’ll be none of that swearing for a start.
He went down to the bar. Drinking would be one way of dealing with this detachment, this disbelief. He stared at the bottles, the beer barrels, the little taps: crimson wine, black and ivory stout, oily invisible gin. He stared at the drunken soldiers around him, and the blowsy girls. Sex. He recalled the feeling of the curve of a hip under his hand. Would any hip feel like that? Send the frisson, the glow, the shot of warmth and possibility up his veins, under his skin, to his heart and his belly and the back of his eyes?
Now was the time to change the mood. How was he to do it?
He went upstairs, and finally wrote his will, on the pages labelled for the purpose in the back of his Soldier’s Small Book (paybook, military service record, instructions on how to avoid bad feet – rub soap into socks). He left everything to his mother. He’d get the train as soon as he had worked out what to say.
The food was bloody brilliant. Oxtail, dumplings, steamed pudding for dinner. Fish and chips and chocolate for tea. He bought a box of twenty-four bars of Fry’s Chocolate Cream, and ate them sitting on the narrow bed. He bought two more boxes, made a parcel and sent one to Ferdinand with a note: ‘You’re to eat all of these yourself: NO SHARING’, and the other to Ainsworth: ‘PLEASE HAND THESE OUT TO DESERVING CASES.’
He had a second bath some nights, and had to pay extra for the hot water. He noticed he had given himself a little pot belly with all the food.
He couldn’t go and not talk to them. He couldn’t talk to them.
He lay on his back with his new officer shoes off and one by one ran through the people he might talk to, and what he could or couldn’t say to them. Everything he had to say: I love you, it’s hell, I walk on corpses and breathe death, it’s only a matter of time before I prove a coward, and I don’t want to be a coward, but I don’t understand, either I kill people, or I’m a coward, that’s the choice, someone somewhere set it up and I get no vote, I can’t say, ‘I don’t accept that’ – and I have accepted it, for a year I’ve accepted it, this is the situation but I don’t understand how I got here, how it is just going on and on, and nobody mentions it, and if you don’t like it they think you’re mad, and you get shot, for cowardice, desertion . . . and your own men, your companions, your brothers, have to shoot you . . . and I’m so fucking scared out there every day, every night—
and now they’ve made me a fucking officer—
STOP IT.
You’re a soldier, Riley, a good soldier and a decent bloke. For a bleak second he desperately wanted to go back to the front, where there was no time or space in a man’s mind to think about anything beyond good soldier, decent bloke. No – officer. It’s different. I will have responsibility.
Yes, but no actual authority.
They were proud he was an officer now. That was the kind of thing people at home wanted to hear.
He didn’t want to think of Nadine as ‘people at home’. He wanted Nadine to know and share every single damn thing he ever knew or did on this earth, and to understand, and to share hers too . . . and he would rather get a shell tonight than have Nadine even hear of the possibility of the things he had known in this past year . . . and how do you get round that one?
And you’re leaving her alone, remember? He hadn’t answered her letter in response to his Christmas card.
Yes, but I . . .
He looked out at the sea. Many nights he could hear the guns. On the seafront, some philanthropist had put up an iron sign on an iron leg, pointing out what was where across the sea: Calais, Dieppe, Dunkirk . . . Rome, Amsterdam, Moscow. He held his hand out in front of his face, like a divider. This side, to the right, ours. That side, to the left, theirs. Down the middle in the sump, us lot.
Amsterdam, where she wanted to go, was on the other side. Van Eyck and Rembrandt and Franz Hals and . . . a furry peach, a silver-bloomed plum, striped roses and streaked tulips, vanilla and raspberry, arched stems and green beetles gleaming and one little worm-hole . . . bright sunflowers whirling . . . a branch of almond blossom.
What a pompous, self-important, sententious, over-imaginative young man I was. What a thoughtless, useless, unkind . . . to leave without seeing Mum. To make all those decisions about what people were and what that meant – that Sir Alfred was a queer, and would not forgive me for staying out the night, that the Waveneys would never let me marry Nadine, that because Terence did a queer’s thing to me I had to . . . Well, I didn’t know, did I, what I was going into.
So now, now that that world was so distant, and that attitude even more so, how could he pop back into it for tea and a chat? How could he write to that world, saying: ‘I hope this finds you in the pink as I am . . . It’s all pretty quiet here . . . Please send any kind of tobacco, and socks.’
He went back to his room, went back to bed. Turned his pillow over.
He slept all right, though. Dreams, obviously. Not very nice ones. But nothing compared to some of the lads.
*
Captain Locke had said, in that charming way of his, ‘If you pass through Sidcup on your way to town, pop in and see Mrs Locke, would you? It’s not far from the town. Tell her I’m all right? You won’t have time, of course, but . . .’
Purefoy was reminded of how the posher someone was, the less they seemed to care about class – those educated, wealthy, dreaming men who don’t have a simple clue what is not possible when you are poor. He both loved and hated them for their genuine ignorance. How marvellous, how ridiculous, that it should be possible. He allowed himself to wonder what Mrs Captain Locke would think of him, Purefoy, turning up. The trenches were in some ways a leveller, to those who took it that way. But the advances Purefoy had craved were only cultural and matrimonial, wherein the Flanders mud had offered no progress, other than the odd burst from Captain Locke’s gramophone, and the occasional expression in Captain Locke’s amiable blue eye that showed he, too, knew of the existence of Better.
But Private – whoops – Second Lieutenant Purefoy calling on Mrs Captain Locke of Locke Hill? Dear God, no.
Chapter Five
Sidcup, June 1915
Julia stood in the hall at Locke Hill, little feet firm on the black and white tiles. The doormat was crooked. She straightened it.
It was rather a beautiful morning outside. She could – she should – be out on the lawn, admiring the sun in the lilac and smelling the early roses. A cup of tea, perhaps, in the little Sitzplatz Peter had arranged beyond the hornbeam. She must find another name for it. Or a stroll by the stream. Max would want a walk.
She had heard the phone go, and she heard Rose deal with it. Rose was so good – such a blessing to have such a sister-in-law. Cousin. Peter’s cousin. Cousin-in-law. It was a shame she was away so much with her hospital, and lovely when she came back for a visit.
Julia went into the sitting room, hoping to find some tiny aesthetic job that needed doing. All through the war, since Peter had left – five months now! – she had kept it looking nice, in case he should come, because you can’t rely on communications, and he might, you never know, just turn up unannounced, and a woman has to do something. He never had turned up unannounced, but his leaves had been erratic . . .
She went over to admire their wedding photo, silver-framed on the piano. Pretty her, at twenty-four: heavy satin, family lace, and the wide, deep-bosomed neckline of before the war, which suited her so well. Already it looked dreadfully old-fashioned. Her hair was as pale as her dress. She glowed, truly. Like the inside of a seashell. And handsome him, at twenty-seven, tall and happy, trousers flapping round his long legs, in morning dress among his myrmidons in morning dress. No idea of war on their sweet faces. St George’s Hanover Square had been filled with white lilac and orange-blossom and roses – Madame Alfred Carrière – sent up from Locke Hill in baskets. The people in overcoats and caps who had gathered to observe and admire had not been disappointed by Peter and Julia.
They had had no idea that he would be called upon . . .
Well.
He hadn’t been called upon. They hadn’t had to call him. He had been only too eager to leave.
Yes, well, we’ve been over that, and agreed to disagree.
Don’t go over it again, Julia – what can you hope to achieve?
But even that thought was by now part of her pointless spiral of punishment, herald to the stupid parade.
You said it was necessary, but it was selfish! True, there had been talk of conscription, but only talk! And no one believed they would dare actually bring it in! And certainly not for married men . . . fathers . . . as you might have been by then . . .
And you said it wouldn’t count if you waited to be conscripted. You wanted to give of your own free will.
And I did understand, darling. I understood that when we married we made a bond, and that what you wanted to give was no longer only yours to give – and I had almost expressed it in a perfect, beautiful, wounding sentence, but it had turned ungraceful at the end . . . and so had I, weeping, snivelling, begging.
Why did you want to leave me?
I didn’t want to leave you. This is not about you and me, darling, it’s about the country. If men are going to fight to defend our country, then it is wrong for me to sit here safely, accepting their protection. I should be with them. That is all.
It had sounded terribly manly. She’d liked it, for a moment. But then the waiting started, and with it the fantasising. He left her alone, and gave her nothing to go on, and in her ear the constant gremlin whispered incessantly: How can you possibly be so ungrateful, so selfish, so wicked? That poor man – think what he is suffering and risking for your sake. How dare you mind?
‘Julia? Darling?’ It was Rose, dark, bright, thin, looking round the door. ‘I’m going into Sidcup. Anything you need?’
My husband, thought Julia, but she said nothing because it would be unkind to say such a thing to a woman like Rose.
Rose knew perfectly well that nobody had ever really expected her to be a wife. She’d only been sent to live with Peter’s family in the hope that someone in Kent might marry her, as no one in Wiltshire would, but the hope was only ever mild. She might have been a little in love with Peter when she was young, but everyone – including Rose herself – recognised her now as a woman without marital or romantic needs. Those who bothered to think about her – including, again, herself – thought her lucky to be so, in this depleting landscape where many girls were likely to be left bereft of their expectations.
Rose had scorned the role circumstances offered her: china-mender, correspondence maintainer, ageing wallflower. Instead, back in 1913, she had joined the Kent VAD. At the first training camp in the summer of 1914, when 170 of them had been available to tend a dragoon who had fallen off his bicycle, and the Herne Common local paper had sent a photographer, Rose had identified a different type of woman that she was able to be. She had enjoyed the cricket matches. She liked sleeping in the round tents, learning how to use a biscuit tin as an oven. She liked her grey cotton dress, her army regulation lawn cap, her linen cuffs and collar, county badge and epaulettes, her white gloves for field work. She had looked at Miss Latham, who had served in the Balkans, and the Marchioness Camden, who visited and spoke so encouragingly. She was touched when the Dragoons’ band appeared to play for them, in gratitude for their kindness to the boy on the bicycle. She liked that when the cadets from New College took part in an ‘engagement’, playing the parts of both the invading Hun and the defending Englishmen, she was capable of putting her training into action so efficiently. She liked the slightly bemused looks Julia gave her.
Rose was quite aware that the real thing would be very different. Mrs Blanchard, who had served as matron to an ambulance column in the Franco-Prussian war, had made that perfectly clear. Despite that – no, because of it – I can do this, Rose had thought. By September 1914 she had been attached to a hospital near Folkestone, and had taken up smoking.
Now, in the doorway, she looked at beautiful Julia in the morning light and pitied her. Though beauty was not Julia’s only quality; it could only be the first thing about her. When she entered a room, nobody thought: There is a generous, determined, kind-looking woman. Her kindness, her determination and her flashes of wit were, in everyday life, dazzled out of view by her rich pale hair, her tiny waist, her glowing skin, the surprise of her dark blue eyes, and the slight dip at the bridge of her straight nose, ‘the imperfection which makes you perfect’, as Peter called it. Few people cared about her better virtues. And as she was an adoring wife, not the type to exploit the male response, what was she supposed to do with it? It was only for Peter, and Peter wasn’t there. In a world increasingly made up of women and old, or sick, or juvenile men, unmanned men, it was of no benefit to her. Indeed, it must be a disadvantage. There are always women ready to hate another woman for her beauty, Rose knew that. She had been included – unwillingly – in enough nasty little conversations behind the backs of pretty women by other plain women who assumed, wrongly, that Rose would share their jealousy as she shared their dull looks.
So Rose pitied Julia for her beauty, or thought she did. But Julia had learnt to love her own beauty, because beauty was her currency, and other people valued it so highly. Each day since Peter had left, after breakfast, she sat on the needlepoint stool by the french windows, morning sun streaming in, and tuned his cello. She made a lovely picture. She had thought about it, and she had laughed at herself for having thought about it. She had considered how most charmingly to cast the cello aside (without causing it damage) in order to run into her husband’s arms when he appeared in the doorway. She had laughed at herself about that too.
She missed him so much. What was the point of doing anything without your husband to do it for? She had tried more public-spirited ways of helping out. She’d launched straight in at Elliman’s when they went over to munitions, gamely pulling on a hideous pair of overalls (‘I honestly, genuinely look like that elephant your uncle Kit sent the pictures of from India,’ she said to Rose) and packing explosives into long, tubular shell cases. She couldn’t stick it. ‘The girls are terribly coarse and vulgar, and they don’t like me, and anyway Peter wouldn’t want me all chemical and yellow.’ She couldn’t be a VAD because ‘Well, my hands . . .’ she said, but she was doing herself a disservice there. It wasn’t vanity. It was a horror of blood, an abrupt, puking horror, which helped nobody, and which she was ashamed to admit to. It was easier to confess to vanity. People expected it of her, anyway. She knew that.
A stint at the Department of Pensions in London ended with a kind reprimand from an elderly civil servant driven to distraction by some truly shambolic filing. Only after these false starts had Julia discovered that her real war work was exactly the same as her peace work: Peter.
It started with making nice things for Peter: sandbags, for example. Beautiful sandbags, of quality canvas, or even linen, and she embroidered his regimental crest in the corner: a wild boar’s head with a crown on, the motto ‘Sic Petit Arcadia’ – ‘thus he reaches heaven’. She saw no irony in it at that early stage. Mostly they were used as pillow cases, and for one general, as a shoebag for his dress shoes.
After that hand-knitted socks, scarves, vests, long-johns; cakes, letters, parcels of cigarettes and chocolate with loving messages on the back of amusing picture postcards, selections of the new gramophone records . . . that lovely recording of E lucevan le stelle, by Leo Szilard, that he loved . . . But she grew bored with doing that because she couldn’t see the results, though his thank-you letters were charming. More importantly, she felt, or perhaps more controllably, things should be nice for Peter when he came home.
Rose did not notice Julia’s inability to be satisfied. ‘You don’t really need to . . . I’m sure he’ll write and let us know when he’s coming,’ Rose would say, from time to time, but really she had more important things on her mind – so what if, after the sandbags, Julia had no faith in the wartime post? (So many letters and telegrams flying this way and that! Who knew where they might not end up? He was perfectly likely to turn up unannounced.) And, anyway, Julia had no faith in anyone else’s understanding of what Peter needed, and Julia had nothing else to do.
And when he had come back after training, his farewell few days before leaving for France, Julia’s joy had been so extreme that there was no room for anything else in the house: for anyone else’s emotions, or for silence, conversation, mutual enquiry, rest, forgiving each other the fights there had been about him joining up in the first place . . . and then he had gone again, and she had returned to plumping the cushions. It took her fifty-three minutes to plump every cushion in the house, if she didn’t hurry.
What Rose didn’t know was that Julia spent every night with the same phrases and memories and resentments and ancient conversations lining up at the end of the bed, waiting to take their turn in tormenting her, and woke every morning in howling loneliness for her husband, her sheets too smooth and her bed too tidy, with a hunger for things to be right just as strong, desperate and justified as that of any scared soldier, any exhausted ambulance driver, any battle-weary medic.
Rose thought Julia appallingly self-conscious, the kind who never got anything done. If she applied half the energy she applies to herself and the house to something useful, think what she’d achieve! She’s just going to disappear in a cloud of lavender water one of these days . . . But Rose wasn’t being entirely fair. Considering that Julia had been bred and trained to be a beautiful wife, and nothing else, she wasn’t doing too badly.
‘No, thank you, darling,’ Julia said. ‘I don’t need anything.’
*
Purefoy didn’t get up to town. He lay on his bed in his room above the pub, trying not to think about Nadine. Then, when he returned to France, he felt a new fear: that of not be able to do what was required of him. He was willing enough to go back to the front – keen, even, for duty to blast thought from his mind. He just wasn’t sure that he could walk, button his jacket, say good morning. The week in Dover, the officer training, and the look in Burgess’s eye before he left had all uprooted him.
A good officer. A good Second Lieutenant. A good soldier. The machine of which he was part deftly slotted him back. Even at the dock, he felt the required state of mind begin to descend upon him, inexorably, as on every man there. It seemed to him a mass state of mind, like gas, or the all-pervading stale-biscuit smell of damp khaki. It’s there; there’s nothing you can do about it. It’s somehow natural. Now that he had identified it, he found that he could look at it from arm’s length before letting the familiar sick comfort of it sweep over him again. He wanted to approach all of it with clean senses: the trains, the pristine uniforms going out, the dirty ones coming in, the landscapes streaming past the carriage windows, the rattle of window frames, the smooth slopes and low curves of the heavy countryside towards the Somme valley, the contained anxiety of the station at Amiens, the smells of soot and paraffin, the ever-increasing destruction, the lackening trees, the cling of the muddy road to the sole of the boot, the camp, the dark damp culvert that was the entrance to the trench system.
They hadn’t found somewhere else to send him so he was, after all, back with the Paddingtons in the support lines behind Hébuterne. He found Locke in the wallpapered rabbit hole, and sat on a box, and accepted a glass of whisky. Dinner was about to be served. Locke was stepping out to see how the fellows were doing. Purefoy, accompanying him in his faultless new khaki, polished and presented, whistle and revolver, felt an utter fraud.
Ferdinand and Bowells grinned at him like lunatics. Burgess said nothing, gave nothing away. Ainsworth said, ‘Aye, lad, sir’, and shook his hand. Purefoy felt it quite absurd.
That night, hunched over Locke’s small desk, he wrote a letter:
My dear Nadine,
I am sorry that I had leave just now and I could not visit you. I am sorry that I joined up and left without speaking to you and left only that silly letter telling you I was going. I am sorry I sent you that stupid Christmas card. I am sorry I have not been able to write to you, about my life here, so that you could see how I am, and how I do. There’s no excuses, but there’s reasons, and I will try this once to explain it, because very soon I will be back in the thick of it, and unable again to communicate. This is why: out here, I do not exist. That is my protection against all this. The gigantic upheaval, the all-encompassing immensity of what goes on out here, dwarfs the individual to nothingness. There is no room for private welfare, because the common welfare overtakes all. And the horrors? Nat, we have horrors, and the worst horror is that before I came away on leave I no longer saw them. I stopped looking, because seeing doesn’t help, and I didn’t like what I was seeing. Instead, I concentrate, an almost hypnotic state of concentration. It’s as if I am running past everything at a jog, thinking only of where I am going. My self retreats, my focus is narrow. My body does what has to be done.