style="font-size:15px;"> They were quiet for a while after that, till Nenna said carefully: ‘How is it London?’ and Tom said: ‘È bella. Tu vien vicina. Io ti darò il pan del re.’ It’s beautiful. You come near. I will give you the bread of the king.
They sat for hours on the various stone and mud beaches of the island comparing things, playing games, as the river ebbed and flowed. They laid out their opinions and thoughts and preferences for comparison, proceeding with increasing alacrity as each test was passed and each admission approved. Kitty tried to express her regret that they hadn’t met earlier. Nenna was able to make it clear that she had always wanted a sister. Tom relaxed in the company of females. It was very satisfactory.
Later, family legends developed about these first meetings: that this was the first time Tom ever embraced a girl and he never got over it; that Kitty, who thought herself plump and dull, saw a Mediterranean nymph with skin like honey and hair the colour of olive oil, and that Nenna, who thought herself plain, saw a princess, a rosebud, a pink and golden creature out of a fairy tale, and a silver-haired prince like King Arthur. Everyone recognised it as some kind of love at first sight, and when it was time to go home, sadness prevailed.
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
