Читать книгу Devotion - Louisa Young - Страница 10

London, 1928

In a way, Riley liked it when the family was absent. He liked the peace in the house: he and his father-in-law ignoring each other in a manly, companionable way. There was just Mrs Kenton and the char, who lived out anyway and took the opportunity to keep to themselves. (After nine years Riley still wasn’t used to servants – he still felt it pure freak that he wasn’t one himself.)

He liked the way habits settled in: that Robert would play the piano in the drawing room, while Riley sat with the paper or a book, reading a new manuscript if he felt like it, after a day at the office or the printers. Riley remained a hands-on publisher – literally. No matter how well he scrubbed his hands with petrol, the ink was ingrained in them now and his fingers were grey for life. Sometimes the thought crossed his mind: if I had lost my eyes, or my hands … and if I had, would I be thinking, dear God if I had lost my jaw, my clarity of speech, my ease with food? And then it floated past, a skein of cobweb on a breeze, sticky only if you touch it.

His was no exquisite press, like Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press, or the Fanfrolico, or Robert Graves and Laura Riding’s Seizin Press. He admired the beautiful books those publishers produced, and did, very mildly, envy the capacity of their producers to ignore the commands of commercialism in favour of aesthetics, both in the content and the look. But it was all very well to have an heiress wife and be the first to publish Ernest Hemingway, or to set up a lovely little enterprise in Paris or Florence. God knows he would have loved to have been in a position to publish something like The Waste Land (which had recently become another object of obsession for Peter). Nancy Cunard could wax lyrical on the joys of the dirty hand, and he respected that – sort of – but this was not him. He was not weighing the beauty of the paper and writing odes to the texture and smell of the ink. His hands had been dirty for years.

No, he was building up a business which would keep his family – his ma and pa, and his sisters, as well as Nadine and, depending on what happened with Peter, Kitty and Tom too, and perhaps Rose. And his books were not for admiring. They were for reading in cheap cafés, for learning from on the bus, for carrying round in the pocket of your one greasy jacket while you go after jobs. The how-to books for autodidacts continued to sell solidly; Riley had hired a young man to update the topical ones annually and they were issuing new ones each year (1928’s included A Mother’s Guide to Preparing your Children for School; and Basic Happy Health at Home, which Rose wrote). An accountant had been hired too, and an editor with connections among journalists. The detective stories were going so well that Riley insisted his partner Hinchcliffe, who wrote them, give up the publishing side and write them full-time on a contract. Hinchcliffe had turned out to be really imaginative, and to have a great line in American wickedness. He got the lingo, he said, from reading gangster stories, and pinched his plots from the Bible and the Greeks. Riley was proud of having volunteered him to write them.

The family being absent gave Riley an opportunity to visit Peter without the continuing low chill from Tom being an issue, and to go striding about with him on the Downs. It was not even a year since Riley had forced Peter across the Channel to Flanders, at some kind of emotional gunpoint, almost bodily dragging him out of his ten-year post-war stupor, the snug of whiskey, agoraphobia and 1916 which had held him for the previous decade. This last rescue, with its declarations that he, Riley, needed Peter to wake up and come back into the world, because he, Riley, was lonely and damaged too and wanted his friend and couldn’t any longer bear to watch him dying by instalments of booze and shame, had been as dramatic in its way as the rescues Riley had inflicted on Peter on the battlefield, and from the sinks of Soho. It really had been ten years – not just since their own wars had ended, but since the War as a whole had ended. It had been Peter’s symbolic ten years, the ten years Odysseus had taken to get home from Troy. Both Riley and Peter were more than familiar with the notion that going over the top together, and fighting alongside each other, put a bond between men that nothing will ever break and no one else can ever break into. They thought it grandiose and not worth mentioning, but at the same time they knew it to be true. And then again the last thing they wanted, now, ten years on, was to have to think of themselves as soldiers. They really weren’t soldiers any more. Ex-soldiers, yes. That, they acknowledged, they would be forever. Ex-soldiers, friends.

And they had created a new thing out of it all. Riley was Peter’s publisher; Peter was Riley’s author. Riley had forced the promise to write the first book from his friend, almost in tears. He had thought it would be at worst occupational therapy, at best perhaps some kind of catharsis – either way, therapeutic for Peter. But Peter’s book, once unleashed, had raced out of him, and turned out to be fascinating, readable, intelligent and – a surprise to all – funny. Peter was not the only person to discover that he could say in writing what he would never say out loud. Flanders Iliad and English Odyssey would be published in November, an item of intellectualism in a sea of war memoirs largely anecdotal, miserable, marinated in hindsight or so far from reality that the sanity of all concerned had to be questioned. For a while now, the main body of Riley and Peter’s conversations had been largely professional, about the ways in which experience of the war were being interpreted. But Peter’s was not a memoir. It was a work, Peter thought, of literary criticism, looking at Homer through the lens of the war they had all been through. Riley let him think this, but believed it in fact looked at the war they had all been through through the lens of Homer. No matter. It was about soldiering, and getting home. And it was done. They were home.

Riley was proud of making Peter write. Odd how a hunch can work out, he thought. If I’d have thought of it on purpose, if I’d planned it, I’d be very proud. But I didn’t. It just popped out.

Riley’s mind wandered about in a different way when his darlings weren’t with him. Ideas had time to develop, and silence into which to emerge. He was thinking now about English crime stories, but grubby ones: in the American style, but set in Soho and Clerkenwell, Paddington and the West End. And he was wondering about Corporal Burgess, aka Johnno the Thief, last seen working as a porter at St Mary’s Hospital. Johnno and Hinchcliffe had met. Perhaps they should meet again …

He liked – God, he liked – not having to talk. He could go and walk about in the park, or not. Wear his ancient trousers in peace. Nobody wanted anything from him.

And then he would go up to bed and look at the smooth sheets, the pillows all in the right place, the absence of a frock and stockings hanging over the chairs, and feel a pang of loneliness as strong as any he had ever had for her, his lovely wife, an echoey emptiness in his chest and his arms … And then he would open the window and the curtains, how he liked it, not how she liked it, and climb into bed and lie comfortably on his back all night snoring without her rolling him over.

He did very much like her letters.

Isola Tiberina

23 July 1928

Dear Heart—

It all seems to be settling down really nicely here. Kitty and Nenna have completely taken to each other, and I really had no reason to worry about Tom. He’s very self-contained as usual. He’s enjoying asserting his age – he’s taken to wandering off and coming back with the most extraordinary vegetables, mysterious tales, and slang words that make Aldo hoot with laughter – I hate to think what they mean. Terrible misunderstandings arise. Both the children have a terror of being sent out to buy figs, because of some nameless horror which would descend if they got the gender wrong; Tom caused deep confusion by believing that someone called la commare secca – the dry godmother – who had made off with some kittens which had been nesting under the bridge was, actually, someone’s actual dry godmother, and trying to find her, to get the kittens back. Turns out she is actually yet another name for death … Come-si-dice-in-italiano, all one word, uttered constantly, isn’t quite a language course, but they’re picking an awful lot up, running around.

I’ve spent some time with Susanna now, she’s quite placid and intense. Aldo told me that even though she’s Jewish, to the Roman Jews she is practically a foreigner – because she’s from Mantua!

Aldo has told us the complete story of the Jews of Rome: did you know they were here before Julius Caesar? I know, it’s extraordinary to think. Before Vesuvius, before Jesus even, therefore before Popes? I had no idea. I asked if they were Sephardic or Ashkenazi? – I’m pretty sure Jacqueline’s – my – family were Sephardic – and he said, with considerable pride, not either, because they left Jerusalem before the division. And Aldo’s father is from that community, and they all lived in Sant’Angelo, just across the river from the island. It was a ghetto, only for a couple of hundred years. Aldo said that sort of apologetically, as if it were nothing much. In 1870, after Italian unification, the Rome ghetto was opened and, as he put it, ‘all the young men exploded like seeds from a pod, and land all over Europe, to make fortunes’. His father, Daniele, landed in Paris and came back to Rome after ten years ‘with pockets full of gold dust and a young wife of Paris’ – and that was Mariana, my mother’s sister. As she was foreign that too counted as marrying out, but his father was not religious and couldn’t wait to get free of Judaism and religion and the ghetto and everything. So he – the grandfather – bought this house for his mother, so she could be near the old ghetto and the new Synagogue (do you remember it? Vast and modern and yellow, right on the river, with the square-based dome?) and bought himself a little flat north of the Villa Borghese, as far away as possible. I have to say Aldo is most passionate about it all and rather extreme – he calls the orthodox Jews ‘those zionist fools down by the fishmarket with their curls and their Hebrew’! I still have to get him round to telling me properly about his mother, but I have a feeling she may never have got a word in edgeways even when he was a child. He is marvellous, but it is quite a relief when he goes to work. He is extremely handsome though and very funny with the children – he has a game of pretending he can’t see them, which drives them quite wild with delight and fury – ‘I’m HERE PAPÀ! I’M HERE!!!!!’ – ‘Where? What’s that voice? I can’t see anyone here!’ – Or rather they say ‘SONO QUI!!!!’ or even ‘SONO IO!’ which is ‘I am me’ which comes out rather Freudian, doesn’t it? – the ego insisting on its existence to the father …

Are you well, my love? Are you lonely? Any news from Rose? Or Peter? How is the dear dad? I think of you having your peaceful dinners without us, reading your papers undisturbed …

all my love to you both …

your Nadine

The children not being there was lovely and peaceful. The possibility of a pint with Hinchcliffe or a quiet dinner out with Peter, without the nagging feeling that Kitty would not be getting her goodnight kiss.

It had bothered him, when Nadine had brought up the matter of their ‘own’ baby again. He didn’t – he wasn’t – he didn’t know how to answer, beyond plain reassurances. He loved Tom and Kitty. Any doubts he’d had about taking them on had melted away in the strength of their need. And they were enough for him. If Nadine miraculously got pregnant – and the doctors seemed to think it would be miraculous – and yes, he could admit he did not want to have anything more than he had to with doctors – but if she did become pregnant, how would he feel about it?

God knows.

Terrified, probably. Haunted by that grotesque scene of Julia, dead in her nightdress, laid out on the icy lawn, Peter beside her, smoking, out of his mind with compounded grief. Remembering too being downstairs at home while his mother gave birth to his sisters, and to a stillborn brother, a few feet above him, just beyond the floorboards. No, he did not want Nadine to have to face any part of that danger, that fraught and terrific uncertainty, the ferocious play of hope and fear, let alone the drugs, the blood, the timescale, the effort – he didn’t want any of that anywhere near his tender, thin, waxen wife. Her soul had always seemed too big for her skeleton. How could she carry and build another whole body and soul inside her?

To be honest, he would have carried on using johnnies, or her rubber cap, to save them both from all that. But she was in charge of her cap, and when she threw it away he was in her hands. And when the doctor said that pregnancy was extremely unlikely, he was relieved. As was she. Or so she said.

After a couple of weeks he was going crazy with loneliness.

There was, though, one thing that he had to do while they were away. He’d put it off long enough.

In the smart, pale surgery in Harley Street (tall mirrors, white hydrangeas, magazines, a music-box full of sweets for the children), Harold Gillies was a different kind of surgeon to what he had been in 1917, when they were Captain Purefoy and Major Gillies at the Queen’s Hospital in Sidcup. The old wounded soldiers were not neglected, but Gillies had other kinds of patients now. He made new faces for civilians: the burnt industrial worker, the bus driver who had had the terrible crash, the cancerous, the ageing film stars with too many chins. As Riley went in, a small girl with a bandaged eye was coming out.

‘That’s Margaret,’ Gillies said. ‘Lovely girl. Just fixed her drooping eyelid with a bit of kangaroo tendon. She’s doing well.’

Riley sat down, across from him, over the leather-topped desk. He leaned forward a little and placed on it, carefully and respectfully, a small, shiny, greying pink object, arch-shaped and set with creamy teeth. Without this in place in his lower jaw, Riley could not really talk. The spluttery mess which came out of his collapsed mouth when he tried rendered him incoherent, and therefore silent by choice, under the circumstances. It all rather took him back, and as when a thirty-five-year-old sleeps in his old childhood bedroom and feels fourteen again, Riley found, sitting here jawless, that he reverted somewhat to what he had been, back then. Helpless, he thought. Bitter and scared.

‘Well,’ said Gillies, his tone changing. ‘Old chap.’

Riley heard the words and the change of tone, and decided that everything was for the worst. He knew it; had known it for a while. The pain. It had never hurt before, not like this, with no provocation. So, what, cancer? Something coming back to get him; some germ from the mud, some bacteria or mutation that had been lying in wait? He knew what it meant, and he had a mad, vivid thought: I shall have to kill myself.

Then, come on old man. Hold on a minute.

‘It’s lasted you very well,’ Gillies was saying.

Riley faded out.

‘Purefoy!’ – Gillies’ voice again, as hard and strict as it had ever been at Sidcup. The voice of authority and knowledge, the voice of the man who saved me, who hauled me back over the cliff-edge I’d already fallen off. The voice which wouldn’t let me go. Snap back, Riley

don’t want to. Not fucking going through any of that again

Snap back man

no

Riley!

Fuck off

He snapped back. God, he must have almost fainted.

Fainted! How very manly.

‘Would you like a glass of water?’ Gillies asked. Gillies knew. He has seen so many of us, he knows about us …

Riley would like a glass of water. He took out the etched brass straw that went everywhere with him, and twirled it, and when the girl in white appeared with the glass he put the straw into it and sucked, slowly, carefully. He wasn’t going to lose dignity in front of Gillies. Anyway, he was perfectly good at this by now.

‘As we know,’ Gillies was saying, ‘the type of splint you’ve been using doesn’t last forever.’

Do we know that? Riley thought. I must have missed that part. I don’t think I did know that.

‘To be straight, you’ve been pretty lucky to get away with it for so long …’

Have I?

‘… But you’ve looked after it well, in general …’

But?

He just looked at Gillies.

‘However, you’ve managed to crack it – look.’

Gillies picked the splint up. ‘See that?’ An almost invisible fracture ran across the bottom. Riley squinted at it. ‘That’s what’s been causing the pain,’ Gillies went on. ‘The edge has been rubbing and I’m afraid there’s some ulceration …’

Riley nodded wisely, peering.

‘If you’d come in earlier …’

Riley glanced up. I came, didn’t I?

Gillies grinned at him. ‘The splint is old and broken, there’s ulceration and a liability to infection. This old splint’s not going back in, that’s for sure. Your jaw has changed shape somewhat since you were twenty-two. Riley, this is the perfect opportunity for the osteochondral graft I should have given you in 1919.’

I’m not going back into any of that. Nope.

‘I know it’s not what you want to hear.’ He gazed at Riley kindly.

But I’m already back. Sitting with Major Gillies, being told about things to be done to me, with no choice about it.

Hang on – no, that’s nonsense.

This is my life. I don’t belong to the army like I did then. I am not that boy, so very out of his depth, traumatised as the head doctors say, shellshocked – was I? God, I don’t know – anyway, I’m not him, and I’m not there, and I’m not then. I’m a grown man, thirty years old. With a wife. And children. And ageing parents, and two sisters (one unmarried, the other married to a spiv – secure? I shouldn’t think so), and a father-in-law who’s beginning, to be frank, to go a bit gaga. And with a company to run, and employees.

Yes, you’re really going to kill yourself, aren’t you Riley?

‘Riley?’

I can’t go through all that again. I could hardly do it when I was out of my mind on war; how can I do it now that I am sane and happy and normal?

‘We’re much better at it now. It will be much simpler. We can take the piece of rib, your own rib, give you an Esser inlay, which would allow a solid rank of dentures … Riley?’

Riley looked up.

‘Hear me out,’ said Gillies. There was no trace of New Zealand left in his accent at all, Riley noticed. He was balder, as well, though hair was never his strong point. Things change. How has my jaw changed? Regressed, disintegrated, deteriorated, fallen apart, rotted? He thought about Jarvis, with the little horsehair stitch at the bridge of his new nose, to keep it narrow. Well Christ, of course horsehair would deteriorate over fifteen years … But that’s all right, you don’t need stitches once things are healed up. I’ve been healed up for years! Me and my – he stared at the pink thing on the desk, his companion, his sine qua non, part of him but not. Vulcanite? It’s a kind of rubber … He thought about bicycle tyres and the soles of shoes, ten years old. He wanted to move his jaw gently, very gently, side to side, but without the splint in the flesh it just hung there, empty. Nobody saw him without it. He was not a vain man. Quite the opposite. He didn’t like attention.

‘The skin is good,’ Gillies was saying. ‘It can take another bout of surgery. There’d be no flap this time, no pedicles. Our techniques are vastly better than they were. Pain relief, anaesthesia, antisepsis, all transformed. You won’t be my guinea pig …’

There was a pause.

I wouldn’t have had any life at all, were it not for this man.

Riley remembered the boy – what was his name? – who had injected his leg with paraffin wax, to get those ulcers, to get sent home, and ended up with some carcinoma. You seek to save, and in the seeking it turns out you destroy.

Riley leaned forward, picked up the splint, opened his mouth and started the procedure: let your jaw hang, relaxed. Left side in first, then crook your finger into the right-hand corner of your mouth to pull it wide to let the right side in, don’t choke, mind the ulcerated bit, find the peg on the stub of the left ramus, position, and on the right ditto, position, pulling the mouth opening from side to side as required to make room. Then both forefingers in at once, to the back, to knock it down into place. Bite down. Find some saliva, to ease the discomfort. Not so much you dribble.

‘No,’ he said, now his mouth was back to normal, and could speak.

‘Riley—’

‘By all means treat the ulcer,’ Riley said. ‘And I would appreciate a new splint. But no. No. No.’ He smiled politely. ‘No,’ he said. ‘No thank you.’

As he left, heading down to Oxford Street to get the bus, Riley had in his mind a phrase that he had spotted once in somebody else’s notes at Sidcup: ‘Refusal not considered reasonable.’ He knew Gillies hated that he wouldn’t let him finish the job. But it’s my head. It’s not unreasonable to not want your head dismantled again.

He was not going to tell Nadine about this. Certainly they told each other everything, but that didn’t mean telling each other every stage of everything, when it might make the other unhappy, unnecessarily.

So you’re worrying about upsetting her and thinking about killing yourself, simultaneously? He laughed at that. Good old self-mockery.

It felt very strange. Such similar emotions to those of ten years ago. But so different now.

He settled into a corner seat, and gazed out at the limp, thick green leaves in Hyde Park, great pompoms of trees with the parkland beneath them wide and golden like a savannah.

‘So that was all a grand success?’ Riley asked, when they came home, sunburnt, lugging bags of polenta.

‘Did you miss us?’ cried Kitty, embracing his middle.

‘Hello darling,’ said Nadine, shining at him, removing Kitty, and hugging him, her arms inside his jacket, as if they were still nineteen. Tom grinned at him from across the room.

‘Rose is coming to dinner,’ Riley said. ‘I knew you wouldn’t mind.’

Within days, it was as if they had never been away. Only of course it wasn’t.