Read My Dear I Wanted to Tell You Online
Authors: Louisa Young
Locke Hill, Christmas Day, 1918
Julia was up first the next morning. She half woke from fitful sedated sleep unaware of what had happened. Only when she tried to open her half-paralysed eyelids, and touched her cheek and felt dressings, did she lurch from her bed to look in the mirror. A horrified elation seized her. What was underneath the slathered ointment and the draped and taped gauze? Dared she look? She didn’t need to. She could feel burning and aching, a toxic, insubstantial shredding. Nothing that felt like that could be anything but ugly. Her mind was far from clear, but what was clear to her was that everything she had been was over. No more beautiful face.
After a moment she gave a little laugh.
Well!
The word ‘over’ was the one that stayed in her mind.
Determined not to hide in bed, and misjudging her physical strength, she went downstairs. She looked into the morning room, saw that Mrs Joyce had laid for breakfast the night before, and then went to the kitchen, where she took out bread and tea and milk, and put the kettle on the range, before her knees gave way and she sat down, feeling very weak and odd. She was sitting at the kitchen table when Tom pottered in, dragging his stocking behind him, looking for someone to witness its glory.
‘What have you got there?’ Julia asked carefully, through her burnt lips.
Tom was frowning at the sight of her.
‘I hurt my face,’ said Julia, observing him. His hair was sticking up, like a little duck’s tail. ‘Don’t be frightened.’
The doctor must have given me something – I feel quite light-headed. This is awful, to let Tom see this.
‘Poor Mummy,’ said Tom.
When Peter came in, looking for water, shambolic and seedy in last night’s clothes, hangover dripping from him like slime, he stopped dead at the sight of his wife crying through her dressings, and the little boy sitting with her, patting her shoulder, saying, ‘Poor Mummy.’
Julia looked up at him. Amazement stopped her tears. She hadn’t known that he was here. ‘You look dreadful,’ she said.
‘You too,’ he said. ‘But I think I smell worse.’
‘You can bathe,’ she said.
‘I will,’ he said. ‘Um . . .’
‘I did something stupid,’ she said. ‘To my face. I may be ugly now. I don’t know.’
It was too much for him. He blinked. Her eyes were blue and clear. That he saw.
‘Mummy,’ said Tom, in an explanatory way, to Peter.
‘Yes,’ he said. His son’s eyes were just like Julia’s. Four great big blue eyes. ‘I am most awfully sorry,’ he said.
There was a pause.
‘Tom, this is your father,’ Julia said. She was holding the little boy’s hand.
Tom stared, disbelieving. ‘Daddy,’ he murmured experimentally, not convinced.
‘’Fraid so, old chap,’ Peter said. He folded himself down from his great height to squat by him, and put his hand over his own mouth.
Tom hid his face in Julia’s shoulder. (Her heart swelled at this, and the clean smell of his hair.) He peeked out again.
Peter was watching him, smiling a little. ‘Mummy and Daddy,’ he said ruefully.
‘Poor Daddy,’ Tom said, and came over to him, and patted his shoulder too.
How does he know?
Peter thought. He put his arms round the boy. Tiny.
‘Pooh,’ Tom said. ‘Smelly.’
He was holding their child in his arms. ‘I am most awfully sorry,’ he said again.
‘So am I,’ said Julia. ‘I suppose I’ve ruined everything, really . . .’
‘Oh, I don’t think it was you,’ Peter said.
‘But everything is ruined, isn’t it?’
He was rubbing his forehead with his long white hand. ‘Could I perhaps be allowed a bath and a shave, do you suppose, before we . . . before you . . .’
‘What?’
‘Discuss things . . .’
‘Do we have to?’ she murmured miserably.
‘I suppose we . . . I’d rather like, if . . . Well, perhaps we don’t. I just had an idea about, um . . .’
Julia’s shoulders were hunched up around her neck. She said: ‘I don’t know if I’ll be up to much.’
‘I don’t suppose, um,’ he said. ‘I mean, nobody, really . . . none of us is at our best.’
Mrs Joyce was next in: bustling, shocked at Julia’s being up, shooing and cuddling Tom, almost fainting at the sight of Peter. She made them all go into the morning room and sit, and be brought their breakfast, and made Julia promise to go straight back up to bed afterwards.
They look like ghosts, the pair of them.
‘Bath and a shave first,’ Peter said. ‘Will you wait for me?’ His eyes were still on his wife. He couldn’t remove them from her.
‘Don’t stare at me . . .’ she said, ashamed.
‘I’m glad to see you,’ he said. ‘That’s all.’
‘Oh,’ she said. That was what it came down to. He was glad to see her. ‘Well,’ she said. ‘I’d better . . .’ The nervous hysterical laughter was still lurking.
Better not laugh. Too mad. Oh, God. Peter, this really isn’t what I . . .
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes . . .’
They were both completely incapable.
*
Rose ran into Peter on the landing outside his bedroom as he emerged, clean and pale, in strangely fitting civvies from before the war.
‘Oh, gosh, hello,’ he said.
She threw her arms round him. ‘Oh, my dear, my dear,’ she said. ‘Oh, my dear.’
He was pleased. He had been so very scared of the reception he would get.
*
Nadine appeared during breakfast.
‘Good Lord!’ Peter blinked.
‘Hello,’ she said, shy with him now, remembering Paris, lying drunk as lords on the lawn of the Tuileries.
‘She’s staying,’ Rose said. ‘I thought you wouldn’t mind.’
‘How could I?’ said Peter, gallantly.
Nadine had turned to Julia, and gasped.
Julia, who had been quietly watching Peter, following his every move, disbelieving, almost, in his physical actuality, rose to the occasion. ‘I’ve burned my face,’ she said calmly, through her tight lips. ‘Stupidly. My own fault.’ Looking around, looking at Peter –
Look! Peter! The real man! He’s as real as Tom, and here, they’re here
– veils were lifting. As a pattern becomes recognisable at a distance, as monsters disappear when the curtains are pulled wide, it was beginning to become clear to her what folly she had been immersed in. But now . . . now . . .
what made me mad is over. Peter needs me sane more than he needs me beautiful. How could I not have known that? If he needs me at all . . . Oh, look at him, look at his shoulders, his hands. He needs . . . he needs everything.
‘Oh! Well—’ Nadine was saying.
‘But of course you must stay,’ Julia said. ‘Please.’ She felt like a queen. She could look up, look out. She could show concern for others. Now she could start to be what she should have been. Wife and mother. ‘Excuse me,’ she said. ‘I must . . .’ and as she rose, her legs gave way, and Peter and Mrs Joyce took her back upstairs.
*
After a while, Rose saw Riley through the french windows, walking up the garden. Quickly, she said: ‘Nadine, there’s something I must—’
Oh dear, there’s quite a lot—
‘I’ve already seen him,’ Nadine said, and as she said it, huge joy rose like a balloon inside her, and a radiant smile burst on to her face, a smile she couldn’t help, that made Tom blink and laugh, and Peter, returning, say, ‘What? What’s going on?’
*
The day developed strange and pure and outside time; a pause between the late chaos and the approaching future. Peter took Tom out to run around the gardens and play with Max. Lunch was the chicken, which Mrs Joyce roasted. Harker produced some leeks. When Peter reached for the decanter, Rose said nothing. Afterwards Peter and Tom played Poor Man’s Patience on the floor of Julia’s room, very quietly, and when Mrs Joyce brought up a pot of tea, Julia roused a little and fed Tom some sugar biscuit dipped in milk, because she wanted to say how much she wanted now to look after them, both of them, properly, but she couldn’t say it. Peter was unable to help her out, but late in the afternoon, before falling asleep in her chair with Tom on his knee, he called her ‘my dear’, and that seemed all right. ‘Plenty of time,’ he murmured, every now and again. Not until Mrs Joyce took Tom to bed, and Julia was sleeping, did Peter start on the whisky.
Nadine and Riley spent all day in the drawing room, by the fire, among the plump silk cushions on the chintz sofa, their feet tucked under each other’s legs. She fell asleep, over and over. He sketched small parts of her – an ear, a wrist, a foot – letting her rest. Thoughts
– her parents, my parents, Sir Alfred
– drifted across his mind, gulls mewing, high in the distance. Riley had realised, looking around at the others, that though he was not very far along, he was further along than the rest of them. He thought about Mickey Shirlaw: a mess when he had arrived at Sidcup, a useful member of the medical team now.
Rose looked in. ‘Stay,’ Riley murmured, so she did, even though there shone around him and Nadine a glow, a dazzle, that repelled outsiders. Towards dusk, a log fell in the fire and Nadine, woken by the sound, looked up and laid her hand on Riley’s tender, swollen, misshapen jaw. ‘Is this it, then?’ she asked gently, with the frown of waking. ‘Is it fully healed now?’
Rose answered. She said, ‘Well, the worst of it’s over, but very deep bruising can take forever to come through,’ and Riley felt the tight stretch of a small, dark smile over his cheekbones.
Nobody expected anybody to leave, or converse much, or anything. Nobody talked about the terrible things they had all seen and done and had done to them, or of the vast and treacherous swamp of recovery and practicality that lay ahead of them. There was an air in the house of disbelief, of shock; a silence too great and mysterious to be broken by more than the quietest courtesies. ‘Will you have some tea?’ ‘Here, let me pass that.’ The silence seemed to have crept out across the drenched lawn and dead roses, the wet garden, the village, out over the ancient sleeping Downs, with grief and realisation hanging in it like rain in clouds. It covered England, under the grey and silver wintry air, and the sleeping heavy Channel. It lay all across France, and Belgium, and Germany, Poland and Russia; all over the great heart of Europe, her fields and rivers, grass and stones and black wet earth, and it rose up through the layers of cloud racked against the wide and empty sky, and the dusk descending. In due course it would become for some a great and unbreakable dumbness, from which reconciling truth would never be able to break free; for others, a healing silence from which some peace might be redeemed.
This novel is fiction with aspects of fact. The history and medicine are as accurate as I have been able to make them. Frognal House and the Queen’s Hospital are real; the house belonged to the MarshamTownshend family, whose son Ferdinand was killed in 1915. The characters are fictional, apart from Major Gillies, Major Fry, Vicarage, Sir James Barrie, Archie Lane, Mickey Shirlaw, Mr Scott the barber and Albert his boy, Miss Black, Henry Tonks, Williams the Nigerian, Brilliant Chang, Sir James Barrie, and Lady Scott, who was my grandmother, and my introduction to the miracles performed at Sidcup.
There were patients called Jamison and Jarvis, but they are not the characters for whom I have borrowed their names. Jack Ainsworth from Wigan did die of wounds at Hebuterne in 1916; his daughter Annie, Granny Annie, as I knew of her, carried Sybil’s prayer in her purse, and passed it on to her grandson who showed it to me. And Jock Anderson really did break every window in the unit to celebrate his fiftieth operation. I intend my use of these men’s names to honour all the patients at Sidcup, and the staff: in particular I think often of Corporal Riley, number 139 in Harold Gillies’s book
Plastic Surgery of the Face
(1920).
Three other books I raided rather shamelessly are
The Great War and Modern Memory
, by Paul Fussell (1975);
Sexual Life during the World War
, by HC Fischer and Dr EX Dubois (1937) and
King’s Nurse
,
Beggar’s Nurse
, by Catherine Black (1939).
Any mistakes in what I have attempted to make an accurate historical context for a fictional story are my own.
I would like to thank Dr Andrew Bamji FRCP, curator of the Gillies Archive at Sidcup, very much, for the kind and useful help he gave me when busy with far more important things; the Wellcome for first exhibiting the field postcard which inspired me, and then letting me use it in this book; Robert Lockhart for the melody which is now irretrievably entwined with this story; my agents Derek Johns, Linda Shaughnessy, Rob Kraitt and Sylvie Rabineau; my editor Katie Espiner; my former co-author Isabel Adomakoh Young; my literate and generous friends Susan Swift Flusfeder and Charlotte Horton, and Robert Lockhart (again) and my cousins-in-law-to-be Diane Haselden and Denise Grundy for lending me the photograph of their great-grandfather Jack Ainsworth, and letting me transform him into an invention of my own.
And, in memoriam, John and Kath Lockhart, and Wayland Young.
FICTION
Baby Love
Desiring Cairo
Tree of Pearls
NON-FICTION
The Book of the Heart
A Great Task of Happiness: The Life of Kathleen Scott
Copyright © Louisa Young 2011
Louisa Young asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN: 978 0 00 736143 4
EPub Edition © 2011 ISBN: 9780007361458
This novel is entirely a work of fiction.
Some characters (or names) and incidents portrayed in it, while based on real historical figures, are the work of the author’s imagination.
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