buy time, to hold his mind, to make it all go away. ‘I think it’s probably too late for us. I’m an awful crock. But,’ – and here, desperate, he said the only thing which ever stopped her from looking so bloody tragic all the time – ‘I could perhaps not drink so much.’
‘I would like that,’ she said, and he saw the sudden whirling desperate hope erupting inside her. It filled him with despair.
Jesus Christ, Julia, he thought. I will never make you happy. You never will be happy! You’ve ruined your famous beauty, for me – poor fool! I’m a lush and no one else will want you. There is no chance for you now, shackled to me. And yet look at you, all hopeful – dear God, what a woman – let’s make you smile. Perhaps I can make you smile …
‘Well, I’ll give it a go,’ he said. ‘Perhaps I might – should I? Go to one of those places.’ I could do that. Could I? His heart was still going in that sick-making way – too quick and light, and all over the place.
‘Oh, please!’ she cried, too keenly. Clearly she had been about to say, ‘Oh no, of course not!’ when she thought: Yes! Grab the chance!
She’s awfully keen to be rid of me, he thought. And who can blame her?
And I’ve overdone it. I can’t do that.
But she was smiling at him, limp and tearful. ‘Oh, darling,’ she said, and corrected herself, quickly: ‘Oh, Peter.’
She looks happy. Dear God, I’ve made her happy! It’s so easy. But I can only do it by lying.
So lie. You owe her that.
Anyway, you lie to yourself all the time.
She was saying she would find someone, she would ask Rose, she was certain things could be better, she was so glad. She jumped up and went off to get on with it all.
Oh, Jesus.
In the course of the rest of the day he drank almost half a bottle of whisky and two bottles of wine. ‘Final fling,’ he said cheerfully. Julia beamed at him, the tight smile of her skin lit from within by a genuine if bewildered hope.
Keep away from me, he thought. Just keep away from me.
Locke Hill, March–April 1919
To Rose it looked nothing like a fling. It looked like desperate unhappiness, i.e. business as usual.
The newlyweds heading off into eternal nuptial joy meant that Rose was now on her own with the two ghouls, the two fluttering, ragged banners gloriously emblazoned, in Rose’s eyes, with her failure to save them. Peter and Julia lurched through her days and tagged across her mind, united in bitterness, loss and the seeming impossibility of redemption. Frankly, Rose preferred being at work with Major Gillies at the Queen’s Hospital, looking after the facial injury patients. There at least the men were getting better, and moving on, or they were dying – but at least they were not stuck on a ghastly merry-go-round of their own making, with so little idea how they got on, and no idea how to get off. Not that I know any better, Rose thought. It’s just that I can see their every mistake – the ones they’ve made and the ones they’re still making.
Peter did not go somewhere. The idea of ‘going somewhere’ dissolved with the daylight: he would not go somewhere because, it turned out, the places he might go required him not to drink at all. He seemed to think alcohol was a balanced diet – untouched trays went in and out of the study, where he sat with the blind half down, reading his Homer. Rose would stick her head in, calling him old bean, trying to tempt him out with walnut cake (they had to chase every scrap of food into him), and minding so much that he didn’t seem to mind when she treated him like a schoolboy. And equally untouched trays went up and down the stairs to Julia, who went up to bed and stayed there, ‘resting’, later and later in the mornings, longer and longer hours, the room over-warm and the curtains half open, promising that she would really try, about the getting up. Oh the curtains – Millie the housemaid trying to open them, in the interests of fresh air and health and doing as Rose had instructed her, and Julia telling her not to, and Millie, disgruntled, leaving them hanging as nobody wanted them: half open, limp, unconvincing, unconvinced. Slatternly. Millie had been a pest ever since having to come back into service, after being sacked from Elliman’s for flirting with the foreman. It wasn’t Rose’s job to hire and fire, any more than it was to look after Peter and Julia – but when a vacuum develops in a household, someone like Rose, with her strong hands and her clear eyes, cannot help but fill it.
And into this dim stuffy room Eliza would take Tom, where Julia would cry on him, and make him lie down beside her, and stroke his head, and say: ‘Oh Tom, Tom, what is to become of you?’
Was it just that socks needed pulling up? Was it some kind of shock, some nerve condition? Were they ill, or not? Dr Tayle said rest, exercise, exercise, rest, fresh air, good food, rest … Dr Tayle seemed to think if Peter could be made to walk Max every day, everything would be all right. But Peter didn’t care for Max any more, and anyway Max was always curled up on Julia’s bed, adding to the fetid smell up there of hormones and old Malmaison, and leaving silky red hairs all over the silky orange cushions. Of course Peter was unhappy, but he wasn’t wounded – the limp from his leg wound from the Somme was hardly perceptible – and he didn’t seem to be sick. There were no particular signs of shell shock – so what was it?
He needs to see a proper doctor! she thought. But he refused to see even Dr Tayle.
And anyway, Rose had her own work. Today had been particularly demanding: two skin flaps had failed, one fellow – borderline already – had had a full-on attack of hysteria, in front of the entire ward, and another had moved from what had been a small infection into life-threatening sepsis, and Major Gillies had actually shouted at Sister Black about hygiene – unimaginable! the idea that he would shout, or that Sister Black would let standards slip. While there were no new patients as such, thank God, there were still men coming through from other hospitals with badly healed facial injuries, or badly done sew-ups or attempts at reconstruction – which were worse, because of having to tell them they need to go through it all again – or worse still, that they can’t – and the men’s disappointment … But they were getting there. If the end wasn’t in sight, at least there were no more new beginnings.
She was pushing her bicycle up the lane and into the shed, wishing that Nadine was there to talk to about it. Or Riley. She missed their good sense and their humour – it was all so bloody tragic round here! But she would hardly write to them while they were on honeymoon: ‘Sorry to tear you from your bliss; can I moan on a bit more about my cousin and his wife?’ If they think of us at all it would be to give thanks to the Lord above that they’re not still stuck here with us, she thought. They’ve escaped. They’re not really anything to us any more. Or perhaps they are. But they’re not family. They’re not responsible like I am. She realised she didn’t know what wartime friendship meant, now that war was gone. Would we even have met, without the war?
It all brought up again a question that had been bothering Rose for a while. Her big question. Should she leave Locke Hill? She’d stayed – had special permission, even, to move out from the nurses’ residence at the Queen’s Hospital – in order to help them all. Her former patient, Riley; exhausted Nadine, back from nursing in France; poor sick Julia; shattered Peter … But now that Riley and Nadine were married and gone, and order – well – order was meant to be being restored to the world, did Peter and Julia need their own house back just for themselves and Tom? Because ideas had been emerging even in reliable Rose, over the dark winter, and – not that she could think of mentioning it – she very much wanted to leave. Throughout the war she’d given her donkey work to the hospital, and her affection to Peter and Julia, Riley and Nadine, Tom.