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I understand that.
I will prove them wrong.
In the month of his service he proved it by arriving earlier than everyone else each morning (which required the doorman to come in earlier to let him in, an extra three-and-a-half hours’ pay per week); staying later (requiring the doorman to stay late, at variable cost and annoyance to his wife, depending); and by refusing the lunches where he might, with the charm and intelligence they recalled from before the war, have been useful with potential customers. His main project was to refile everything in the recent archive according to a new system of his own. Putting the ledgers and legal notebooks and jute files of thin silverleaf paper into the right places seemed to him honourable work, and it made him feel safe – well, not safe. One is never safe in this world . . . But there was a small joy in it. Of course the oldest should be on the bottom and the newest on the top. It made sense! He had read about an ancient Chinese system where the position of items in a household or workplace had an effect on the fortune and spirits of the inhabitants and workers … he didn’t go so far as to believe in it, but of course the new must lie on top of the old! It’s how the planet is built, how history works, layer upon layer. It was morally and aesthetically wrong to put the new things at the back of the file. We are going forward towards Utopia after all, not harking back to Arcadia! Arcadia kills you, because it prevents you progressing into your own future. Odysseus knew that, when he made them tie him to the mast while the Sirens sang – you know what the Sirens sang of? The story of the Trojan War, of the fallen heroes whom Odysseus knew so well. Backwards looking. And the only way Odysseus and his men could get their boat to keep moving towards home was to block out those Siren songs of the past, of the war – which was its own kind of Arcadia, and love of which would keep a man from Ithaca for ever … and Odysseus had to listen to it all, all the corpses and the blood, and get past it.
So my filing system is right.
‘Do you know what his name means?’ he asked his uncle.
‘Whose name?’
‘Odysseus,’ said Peter.
‘No,’ said his uncle.
‘Sower of discord, bringer of trouble. Same root as odium. And odious.’
‘Ah,’ said his uncle.
‘He was tremendously unpopular,’ Peter said. ‘After all, he lost all his men. He comes down as being wise and wily and so forth, but he lost eleven ships with all hands, and his own entire crew. Seven hundred men. Makes me seem a lightweight.’ He watched for some response.
‘Mmm,’ said his uncle.
Uncle, I have just confessed to you that I let my men die – Uncle?
Uncle?
It’s just as well. If they knew what was going on in my mind, they’d put me away.
Sometimes he heard the barrage still, crumping away. He supposed it couldn’t be real. Some trick of the ear and the brain and the nature of time. An echo. Unless it’s still going on, and we’re being kept in the dark, as usual.
Peter’s new system did not match the one everybody else used. It was, he said, better. And he was right. But that did not seem to be the point.
‘Never mind,’ he said. ‘I’ll put everything back. No really, it’s no trouble.’
And he did, thinking about the Augean Stables. For weeks.
At a meeting in late February, Uncle Eric suggested that new stationery might be in order, as the old was looking rather fusty. New world, new times, and so on. That afternoon Peter, without consulting or budgeting, chose a design, approved it and ordered a large consignment.
‘But why waste time?’ he said. ‘You said it needed doing; I did it.’
The next day he sacked the assistant, who was, unbeknownst to Peter, the son of Uncle Eric’s mistress. ‘He wasn’t helping me,’ Peter protested. ‘I don’t need an assist-ant. I don’t need help. I know you resent paying the doorman extra – so we can save money here. And I’m up to date on the contracts now, so I’ve an idea or two for this year and next …’
Uncle Eric suggested that Peter, with his academic and archival talents, might like to have a go at applying his new filing system to the old pre-war archive, which was kept in the Birmingham office.
Peter smiled his distant, charming smile, and felt himself drifting away, back, back, blown by winds he could not control.
Uncle Eric, without telling Peter, rehired the assistant to go through and check everything that Peter had recently refiled.
A few times during February and March, while he was trying to be civil in town, returning each night to Locke Hill or Chester Square, Peter was asked by someone or other at his club what he was up to now; or his mother would telephone from Scotland, inviting him to visit and wanting to know how he was. He actually could not say that Locke & Locke had rejected him. And of course they hadn’t. They still paid him. He still had a desk, in his oppressive office. If he went in, which he didn’t much, Uncle Eric would enquire mildly about the archive in Birmingham – to which Peter never went. Other than that, they didn’t say anything.
‘I know what’s happening here,’ Peter told the barman at the club, politely. ‘I’m HMS Iolaire. Two hundred men after four years of war, shipwrecked and dead on the shore of their childhood home, their families waiting on shore to welcome them. Like Odysseus’ last boat, when the crew let all the winds out of the sack just as they reached Ithaca, and the storms blew them away. For another ten years. Nearly home, starting to relax, and your own damn folly sends you back out there. I do understand. I really do.’
The barman wiped the glasses.
Sometimes, when he caught sight of Julia from behind, in a doorway, or when the dog bounced up to him, his tail high and feathery and hopeful, Peter would be struck with a poignant scrap of … something … a little taste in his mouth of how things used to be – of how I used to be – and then he could almost see a thin skein of desire strung across some part of his being, a high wire, a cobweb, invisible except in certain lights when it might flicker, or glisten, inaccessible, and he would imagine for a moment that if he could only reach that evanescent, tiny wire, and somehow take hold of it, follow it, walk along it, even, balance on it over the void, through this chasm, then it would take him … somewhere … somewhen? No such word. There should be.
He used to like the dog so much. No more. Dirty creatures. Eating God knows what they found in the fields.
That winter he and Riley had walked out on the Downs, in the brisk wind which, as it made conversation impossible, was appropriate to their shared silence about their shared experience. Once or twice, he had felt a wild urge to tell Riley about the dreams where summer rain turned into blood, the dead men, the cheap women, the drink and the shame. He had wanted to tell him that he could not continue to sleep with his wife because the weight of her body beside his was that of the dying Hun boy in the shell crater, and he could not make love to his wife because the feeling of her body in his arms was – not even was like, but was – Bloom’s corpse, which he was carrying in. Bloom, Burdock, Knightley, Atkins, Jones … Remember Jones? He looked like a sausage – well, he did! A big raw pink sausage. And then in the summer – ’17? – he got sunburn, and he looked like a half-cooked sausage. And Burdock – was it Burdock? – joked about wanting to leave him out in the sun to cook all the way through, so they could eat him. (And Burdock had pulled Jones’ corpse in, and someone had said: ‘He’s all yours now, Birdy, cook him however you like.’ And the next day Burdock caught it himself. Or so we assumed, because no one ever saw him again. Though Smiler Rogers saw some guts and a bit of fair hair.)
He wanted to tell Purefoy about the dying German boy.
‘Captain,’ he murmured, on one occasion, but Riley, when he caught the military word, shot him a look, and Peter could say nothing.
He was quite certain that Riley had things he wasn’t saying either. They were both able to take a bit of comfort from leaving it at that.
And in between his dreams of Loos and the Somme and the eighteen hours in the shell hole and the weight of Bloom’s head on his shoulder, Peter would sometimes dream that he had gone on holiday, taken a train, and stepped off at a quiet station where the sign on the platform read, clearly, 1912, and Julia and Max were there, and they were all happy, and they came in a motorcar back to this same house, this same house where he had been a boy, and ate scones with jam.
Even in this dream he did not feel safe. He felt safe only when passed out: feeling nothing.
Sometimes when he awoke Tom would be standing by him, clear blue eyes watching.
Chapter Five
France, April 1919
Riley was out in the world again, and Nadine was terrified for him. She was scared for him being in France again – but it was so different here in the south, he said. Even the language, they agreed, did not sound like the French they had heard in the north. He could feel as if they were in a different country: this sun, these astonishing colours. Olive trees, lizards, lavender. It was nothing like – there. And she knew that to be true.
Peter had insisted on giving Riley and Nadine the honeymoon as a wedding present (despite Riley’s reluctance to accept gifts, which he maintained despite Nadine’s desire that he relax about money). Peter had always been rather sentimental about his own honeymoon (probably it was the last time he and Julia were really happy, Nadine thought. Perhaps the only time). A little hotel in Bandol had been organised for them.
They arrived at night, rattling from the station under a black starless sky, and with no idea of surroundings other than smells – jasmine, pine – and sounds – rattling harness, creaking wheels, the bizarre orchestra of cicadas. In the morning, Nadine threw open the shutters of the cool dim bedroom, and when she saw the beauty that was before her – the radiant glory of blue dancing sea, green musing pines and golden glowing sunshine – she burst into tears.
Riley rolled over. ‘What is it?’ he called, alarmed.
‘I’m alive,’ she said. ‘To see this. Look at it. Look. All this was going on all the time we were so bleak.’
They ate fish and fennel, smelt mimosa – what a miracle that was – and sweet broom and salt. They swam in the spring-fresh sea. Nadine bought Riley a fisherman’s shirt and, it turned out, developed freckles on her nose and forehead. The hotel had a small boat in which they paddled up the calanques in search of kingfishers and turtles and flamingoes. Over and over they found themselves grinning and gasping over something lovely. The scarf that constantly lay double-coiled around Riley’s chin or throat began to be left to hang in a single drape, relaxed, protecting only the back of his neck from sunburn, not his scars and his dignity from the eyes of strangers.
In the cafés, at first, she ordered for him. She explained exactly what she wanted: the bouillabaisse, strained, with extra cream; the boeuf stroganoff very tender, the chicken broth and the oeuf en cocotte, crème de this and soufflé de that. Her concern was visible, she knew: maddening to him and miraculous simultaneously. He let her order. But he would not let her shave him. ‘I’m not going to be a baby to you,’ he warned, and she said, ‘Fat chance,’ which she knew made him feel safer – but was that part of it? Is wanting him to feel safe another level of nurseyness and mothering? Early on, she watched him standing shirtless by the china bowl in the barely furnished room, going carefully around his scars, trying to do the folds under his chin where he could not see, nor properly feel. She could see him seeing her in the mirror sitting on her hands on the bed, wanting to help. The only time he let her, despite her tenderness she hurt him, and he flinched, and she could see that he could see that she found it hard not to weep, and he was sorry, and she was sorry, and after that she left the room while he tended himself. He’s a miracle, she thought. So many things he could have died of. Flaps of skin from his scalp down under his chin, his manufactured chin. He’s Frankenstein’s not-monster. Sometimes she found herself shaking at the thought of what he had been through.
He grew brown in the sun. The waxen scalp skin on his jaw took it differently to the rest of his face, but even so he did not want to grow a beard. He paddled the calanque, and day by day she saw his youth and physical strength starting to flood through his body, healing him and fixing him. It transfixed her. She sketched him each day, to map the transformation as it happened, but her sketches were not good enough and she wished she could photograph him. On the third night, she was watching him sleep, wanting to look more closely at him than his manner when awake would allow, to unveil him. Moonlight was falling on his face, on the strangeness of his reconstructed mouth with its slight downward drag at the right-hand corner and the odd lift at the left, a sort of ugly Harlequin half-smile. She wondered if she feared it, if she wanted to look inside, and didn’t dare. She never, ever wanted to offend him or upset him. He stirred and half woke, under the strength of my stare, she thought, and he hoicked himself up and looked at her.
‘My dear,’ he said, and then thought for a while, and said something more – but his mouth was always clumsier after sleep, and also the moonlight was off his face now, and she could not see him to understand him. It had been interesting, academically, to learn that she needed to read his face, but it was not easy, not helpful to the confidences of the pillow and the encouraging sympathies of the dark. She shook her head, and didn’t want to say, ‘I can’t understand you,’ and terribly wanted to kiss him, because that would tell him …
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