My Dear I Wanted to Tell You Read online

  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.

  While I was at Dover last week that condition of mind receded a little, and I thought clearly, as a human being. But such luxuries are not for the Front.
This is the last evening when my mind and heart are engaged. I have kept them open in order to be able to say this to you. To tell the truth, I don’t want you to know about this kind of thing. But not telling you seems like a form of death, a death of the heart, or the mind, or the spirit. There are more ways than the physical to die, which I never knew before. I have learnt it this year. I do not care to think what else I shall learn as the war continues. As clearly it must.

  We return to the Front Line tomorrow. I am going back under and I will not write again. Pray that I come up again, and my darling be there to help haul me out at the end, if I make it –

  Oh, dear I shouldn’t have written that.

  Well, fuck it. Fuck it. That’s how I feel.

  Chapter Six

  London, August 1915

  The letter, the first since the Christmas card, was sent on by her mother, with a note on the back in swirling, elegant writing: ‘Have you an admirer? Tell all!’

  Not likely. Not after the look on your face when you gave me the first letter, the oh-Nat-I’m-just-going-to-war-’bye-then letter. The stupid stupid stupid unkind letter. Not after you said: ‘It’s probably for the best, darling. I know you liked him but you know he’s not the sort of boy …’

  Oh yes he is the sort of boy, he is EXACTLY the sort of boy. He is THE boy.

  Liked. In the past. Thanks for that little extra, Mother.

  Followed by the Christmas card which might as well have been from someone’s uncle they hardly knew …

  Nadine was not able to say, either to her mother or to herself, that her mother was wrong and she was right and Riley was everything, everything he should be. Because he wasn’t. He was – he had somehow turned into – someone to whom she could only write those stupidly cheerful notes. If she could write at all. Was it distance? Was it the fact of words on paper, uncomfortable, unchangeable? Was it whatever had happened that had made him leave so suddenly? Was it whatever was happening out there, which she couldn’t ask about, which he wasn’t writing to her about?

  But that moment, in the studio, when he had turned to her, and she had turned, and there was that moment when she had thought, for a second of absolute bewildering thrill, that he was going to kiss her, and he hadn’t but he had put his hand … and that moment when they had looked at each other, and then, just then, for that moment … wasn’t he everything? Wasn’t it all true, just true, and possible, and true?

  Like the Donne … eye beams twisting …

  And Papa had said, There’s nothing you can do about it …

  And the heart was true, and the heat, in that moment, with his hand on her waist and that big old pinafore, the hyacinth smell, that morning, was a promise. They had made a promise then. They had. They had. That touch, that surge, that look.

  The entire autumn, no one mentioned him to her. She had wanted to ask. She had lain in bed wondering who best to ask, going round in circles. And when she had asked, she learnt nothing. Her family had heard nothing from him. Sir Alfred had had only a card when Riley was in training. She had asked Terence, who had rather embarrassedly said, no, he hadn’t heard from the old boy. She had been tempted to visit Mrs Purefoy – she had even got her coat on to go to their house – but having already written for his address she grew embarrassed; overcoming the embarrassment she couldn’t find the street; having found the house she grew embarrassed again at its smallness, so she decided to write after all; and having written she received no reply; and thus ignored she retreated into humiliated confusion and did not know what to do.

  During a drawing lesson in the studio she had braved the topic again with Sir Alfred. (Thank God her parents had got over their moment of concern about her studying art, for now at least.) ‘I wonder if there is any news of Riley,’ she said. ‘I suppose he would have written to you. Or his mother.’

  ‘The Paddingtons are in France, I believe,’ said Sir Alfred. ‘Or perhaps Flanders. If he’d talked to me, I would have put in a word for him with the Artists’ Rifles.’ He turned away, and the broad old back said clearly: Enough. Don’t ask.

  So instead she had grown paler and thinner, and began swarming inside, as every possibility, every nightmare, every story in every newspaper, every bad thing that could happen was happening, in her mind, to him. Every single bad thing.

  Jacqueline, as Christmas passed and the war was not over, noticed her daughter’s decline. ‘Go to Scotland, darling,’ she said. ‘Stay with Uncle George. Get some fresh air.’

  ‘I’d much rather go to art school, Mother. To the Slade.’

  Jacqueline closed her eyes for a moment, annoyed. ‘We’ve talked about this,’ she said.

  ‘It’s what I would like to do,’ Nadine said politely. ‘It’s what I am good at.’

  ‘It’s not suitable,’ said Jacqueline, with a little tightening in her face, annoying Nadine, who knew that her mother had sat for plenty of artists in her youth. Jacqueline glanced at her daughter, saw the retort in her eyes, and cut it off. ‘And you’re not good enough,’ she said.

  ‘Who says?’ Nadine replied, stung. This was a new tack from her mother. She was good.

  ‘Sir Alfred,’ lied Jacqueline. A girl needs a good reputation, these days more than ever. Art school is for times of peace and plenty, not for unmarried girls in wartime.

  Nadine held her head very high, and blinked. She didn’t believe it. Sir Alfred knew she had enough talent to invest in. He didn’t think a girl could have a career as an artist, but he didn’t deny talent when he saw it …

  For a moment Jacqueline wavered, looking at her proud daughter, then steeled herself. It’s for her own good.

  Nadine looked at her arms, thinner than ever, and her narrow feet. What was the point of a female? Even at the best of times, let alone during war? All she wanted was art and love … Like Tosca, she thought, with a little laugh. And love was – well, denied. And art too. Her cousin Noel had said to her, on his most recent visit, that he felt less than a man because his asthma prevented him being Over There. Well, she felt less than a woman. At least a man knew he was meant to be a soldier, and a boy knew he was meant to be a man. But she – she was too young to have found out the point of herself anyway, and now she was shipwrecked, stranded in time. Not a woman, not a girl any more, and not, apparently, an artist.

  Scotland?

  No.

  ‘Then I’m going to join the VAD,’ she said blandly. ‘I’m going rather mad here, knowing there is so much to do and not doing anything. I have been reading all about it. I shall take all my frustration out on sheets.’

  ‘No,’ said Jacqueline, immediately, instinctively.

  ‘Well, I must do something, Mama. I think that’s a fair choice, the Slade or the VAD.’

  But Jacqueline could only see it as men, or more men. Artistic, immoral men, with attractively long hair and no prospects, or broken, heroic, half-naked men in desperate need … Getting Riley out of the way was one thing, but there were always more men: wrong ones, new ones, ones outside the systems of safety … Lord, she thought, it used to be so much fun playing with fire, back when everything was safe.

  The wounded, she decided, would be less attractive to her daughter than the artists.

  *

  While scrubbing, boiling, lugging, hanging, pouring, twisting and folding made up most of Nadine’s duties at London General Number 2, Chelsea, the reality of blood and flesh was also available to her, and she saw it. It was a shock, and she was by no means sure at the beginning that she would be able to stay in the hospital. To strengthen her nerve, she blackmailed herself, imagining that each boy was Riley, and she was some French or Belgian girl. Each shattered leg she saw became his leg; each twisted arm was his arm; each pale and sweaty brow was his handsome brow; each gunshot wound settled itself into his flesh. It both brought her closer to them and protected her from them. But what started as a spur and a naturally arising technique of self-protection developed with pandemic haste into a morbid, almost-constant fantasy about the terri
ble things that might be happening to him.

  Jean, older and wiser, with reddened knuckles and a pot of rouge number two in her bag, said to Nadine, over biscuits and Bovril, one carbolic-scented night-shift, ‘You’re ill-wishing him. Don’t. God didn’t give you an imagination so you could use it to worry all the time.’

  So Nadine saved Riley’s letter till Jean was not there. It burnt in her apron pocket. But, oh, the circumstances of the letter faded into nothingness at its contents. He might as well have leapt out of the envelope in person, telling her everything as clearly as he always had, which now were these impossible things, these things that swept her every previous concern to the eight winds. He hadn’t written? Oh, diddums. He had gone away? Poor little you.

  I don’t exist.

  How can that be? She read it again.

  Is it so bad that there is no room in the same dimension of creation for both it and him, and that as it is all-powerful, he must cease to exist?

  That’s the wrong way round, surely. Surely it must cease to exist, because he, palpably, does … It. It. A gigantic amorphous It, and a little speck of warm flesh and blood standing in front of It, in the middle of It, fading away.