Then she thought of Tom again, and asked herself, if I leave, I will create a vacuum, and who’s to say if either of them will be able to expand to fill it? And finally she said: Go to sleep, Rose. It’s not your fault. He’s not your husband. She’s not your wife. He’s not your son.
It was not, in the end, Peter’s outburst that made up her mind. It was the sight of a plucked, untrussed chicken on the kitchen table a few days later. Headless, footless, wing-tipless, pink and naked, it looked alarmingly like a dead baby, arms out, knees pulled up, splayed. Flesh and skin and bone. I know about flesh and skin and bone. I know how they work. I would rather work with them.
Bugger Peter, and bugger Julia, she thought, enjoying the language she’d picked up – only for mental use – from the men she’d been caring for. When the Further Correspondence comes, if I get the chance, I will be off. I will be off.
Locke Hill, April 1919
What Peter had been thinking was what he was always thinking, one way or another: the phrases and repetitions that garlanded his dance with whisky, excusing and justifying on the one hand, denying and defying on the other.
He might have been thinking: Locke, you bastard. What a bastardly horrible thing to say to Rose, who has never done a thing wrong to you, who only cares about you, who has always looked after you. You really are a selfish nasty uncontrolled man. Why would she trust you? You’re not to be trusted by anyone. Just ask (and here the string of names and faces began again, and the tight gulpy feeling would start up in his chest as he slipped into the familiar routine) Burdock … Knightley … Atkins … Jones … Bloom, Bruce, Lovall … Hall, Green, Wester … Johnson, Taylor, Moles, Twyford … and Merritt … Half of them unburied … loss upon bitter loss. An armful of Atkins; Bloom’s head on his shoulder and Bloom’s arm round his neck, resting like a woman’s or a tired child’s. His own long-fingered hand white against Bloom’s hair, embracing the dead head to keep it from flopping … The warmth of the German boy’s body next to his in the shell hole … You were a lousy officer, Peter, and now you’re being a lousy civilian. It’s not surprising you’ve turned out to be a lush. Go on, lush. Have another drink. If you’re honest with yourself, Peter, don’t you see that the pain you’re feeling now is all you deserve? You’re probably causing all this pain on purpose so you can feel worse about everything. It’s all you’re good for … all you’re good for … makes no bloody difference …
Or he might have been thinking: Bloody woman! Bloody Rose, bossing me – and bloody Julia, too, upstairs in that bloody room stinking of woman, crying and blaming me for everything – some bloody Penelope she is to come home to – it’s not my bloody fault! Of course I want a bloody drink. What man wouldn’t want a bloody drink? You’d need a bloody drink to deal with all this – anyone would. You deserve a bloody drink …
Or it might have been: Rose, don’t go. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean that. Of course you belong in this house. You can stay here for ever. Of course you can – you must – dear Rose. Don’t leave me here alone with Julia, with her dead face and her blaming eyes, and that poor child who stares at me like some kind of Cyclops. Rose, come back and have a drink with me. Come on. Sit down, come on. It’ll be nice. Let’s just forget about everything for a moment – for a few hours …
Before the war, after Oxford – where he’d managed to stay on a few years as a junior fellow, teaching and so forth, which had suited him very well – Peter had been steered into the family firm with a view to learning the business. It had not agreed with him, and the moment his father died in 1914 he had left. It was his shame and his mother’s good intentions that had steered him back there in January 1919. He had bowed his head and taken it on: part of his punishment. He had failed in so many ways, due to his own unworthiness as much as the idiocy of his leaders. Well, he determined, if he wasn’t good enough to die with his men, and since the Army couldn’t wait to be rid of him, he would at least make a go of being all that was marvellous at Locke & Locke.
He started on a dull grey morning, late January 1919. There was a meeting to welcome him, and lunch. His father had left a very practical team: they had not on the whole had to fight; they were self-perpetuating; and they respected Peter, as major shareholder, scion of the family, officer. Nobody would tell him he could not have his corner office and the lunches they assumed he would want, once he had his balance back, which everyone thought they understood would take a little while.
There was a young man there who had been instructed to update him on developments and practices, to type his letters, to, what, keep an eye on him? Peter sent him away, and settled in to catch up.
He didn’t really like the look of his office. There was something oppressive about it, and the books seemed rather wrong on the shelves. The filing cabinets seemed very full, and he felt observed. He needed, he decided, to know exactly what was where. That would help him to feel at home, as it were. So he took every book and every file from the shelves and cabinets – that way he would know how far he’d got, and wouldn’t miss anything out – and he stacked them on the floor, and unpacked them, and began to read.
Uncle Eric, wheezy, blinking, and old, who had been running the show, came in to see how Peter was getting along. He found him sitting on the floor like a grasshopper, his long legs folded, knees up by his ears.
‘Not sure you really need to go through everything in every file,’ Uncle Eric said, mildly. There were only a couple of other men in the office who had served. Uncle Eric had not, and he was wary.
Peter looked up politely, and said, ‘Don’t you trust me, old man? Not allowed to read my own pa’s company papers, is that it?’
‘Not at all, not at all,’ his uncle responded, looking foolish and apologetic. ‘Just, well – you do as you think best, and come to me with any queries.’
And Peter did not press him. His uncle’s concerns were transparent. I am not trusted, Peter thought. My judgement and my capacities are doubted. They know I lost men over there – do they know that those men and I were like fingers on a hand? That I held my men’s lives in trust, and they mine, and they are dead, and I am not? Do these civilians have the slightest understanding of what that means? They have been told that I drink; they probably know I was dragged out of a low club by a better man than me.
I understand that.
I will prove them wrong.
In the month of his service he proved it by arriving earlier than everyone else each morning (which required the doorman to come in earlier to let him in, an extra three-and-a-half hours’ pay per week); staying later (requiring the doorman to stay late, at variable cost and annoyance to his wife, depending); and by refusing the lunches where he might, with the charm and intelligence they recalled from before the war, have been useful with potential customers. His main project was to refile everything in the recent archive according to a new system of his own. Putting the ledgers and legal notebooks and jute files of thin silverleaf paper into the right places seemed to him honourable work, and it made him feel safe – well, not safe. One is never safe in this world . . . But there was a small joy in it. Of course the oldest should be on the bottom and the newest on the top. It made sense! He had read about an ancient Chinese system where the position of items in a household or workplace had an effect on the fortune and spirits of the inhabitants and
