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.
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