surgeons could not save his foot, and took it off. Months later, he limped into the house in Chelsea, where the two little girls were running to the door, and nearly brought him down. He was rather upset when both Imogen and Florence began to weep wildly. There were delicious smells—toast, roasting coffee, a bowl of lilies, lavender and, as he bent awkwardly to kiss his half-sister and niece, the smell of clean flesh, and washed hair.
He dreamed he was being buried alive in a dugout, and could not free himself from the weight of earth, steadily increasing. He dreamed of things he had packed away and forbidden himself to remember. Florence made him hot apricot tarts and Chinese tea, with jasmine and its own pale, mysterious, clean smell, in Chinese porcelain cups. They sat him in a chair with a footstool to rest his leg, and their eyes were always just brimming over.
Alone of Todefright’s bright boys, Florian returned from the fighting. Phyllis prepared his favourite food, herb sausages and mashed potatoes, and a Queen of Puddings. Olive told herself that she must love him, steadily and well, because he was alive, and her sons were not. She faced, she thought, the fact that she might resent the survival of this one who was not her own, and put the idea resolutely away. She had a small glass of whisky before the fly came in from the station.
Florian was walking. His appearance was shocking. He was gaunt, and limped heavily, and his skin was puckered and stained and scarred all over. One of his eyelids drooped. His golden curls, which had been shaved off for the draft, were growing back only sparsely and in tufts, and what there was of them looked ersatz, artificial. Worst of all, he emitted a heavy, painful, wheezing sound, having briefly breathed in blown-back English gas.
Phyllis and Olive made themselves kiss him. He recoiled very slightly. Humphry put a hand on his shoulder, and said “Come in, old chap, you’re home.”
He had really nothing to say to them. He sat for hours in the window seat, staring out at the garden. Phyllis tried very hard to love him. They were Violet’s children, and shared an unspoken anger that Violet’s death had been so little marked, had been swallowed up in grief for Tom, as her life had been swallowed up in Olive’s. Neither of them was comfortable discussing this. Neither of them had ever discussed feelings. When Phyllis tried—falling awkwardly over whether to say “Violet” or “our mother”—Florian did show signs of feeling. It was an impatient, sullen rage. She made him little presents of cakes and sweet things, which he ate greedily.
In the day he sat and sat. At night he walked. He could be heard, his limping leg thumping, his wheezing a steady, sinister sound, on stairs and in corridors.
Olive woke one night as he passed the door and felt pure hatred. It was like living with a monster, a changeling, a demon. Then she hated herself, worse than she hated him. Then she went to find the whisky, avoiding the returned soldier because it was so easy to hear where he was wandering.
They noticed he was cutting advertisements out of the newspaper. One day he said he had accepted a post as a teaching assistant at Bedales school. He was, he said, with a sad, grim little smile, good at making camps and things like that.
They said they would see him in the holidays, and he said, “Yes, probably.”
Phyllis wondered why she didn’t go too. She thought, perhaps she would. Perhaps.
ROLL CAN AND OTHER POEMS,
THE WOODS
When Alice stepped through liquid glass
The world before her was deployed
In ordered squares of summer grass
And beasts, and flowers, and gnats enjoyed
The power of speech and argument.
Logic is fine-chopped, roses and eggs
Insult each other; legs of lamb resent
Imputed insults. Peppers and salts have legs.
Clouds scud above, and flying queens
Like startled birds, and sleeping kings
Snore unperturbed in serious dreams
Of knights and dinners—serious things
That come and go amongst the roots
Of little lines of sportive wood
Run wild, where no one ever shoots
To kill or maim, and beasts are good.
Alice skips serious from square to square
Hedges and ditches hold their form
And make a chequered order there.
No creature comes to serious harm.
Our English Alice, always calm
Interrogates both gnats and knights,
Reasons away her mild alarm
At bellicose infants and their fights.
The foolish armies do not die
They fall upon their stubborn heads
And struggle up and fall again
And when night comes, rest in their beds.
Reds clash with whites in the great game.
Their fights are dusty but have rules
And always end with cakes and jam
And Providence is kind to fools.
The woods are dangerous. You lose your way.
The sky may darken and the Crow
Make black the treetops, dim the day
Shatter the branches, blow by blow.
Crump of a tea tray, rat tat tat
Of nice new rattle on tin hat
Saucepan and scuttle flat in mud
As fire flings past and black smokes scud
And no shapes hold. I watched a wood
Mix the four elements so air was flame
And earth was liquid: nothing stood
Trees were wild matchsticks, wild fire came and came
Bursting your ears and eyes. And men were mud.
Were severed fingers, bleeding stumps between
The leafless prongs that had been trees. And blood
Seeped up where feet sank. Helplessly we trod
On dying faces, aimlessly we fell
On men atop of men ground into clods
Of flesh and wood and metal. Nothing held.
There was no light, no skyline, up and down
Were all the same. Our lifeblood welled
Out of our mouths and nostrils.
In another wood
Alice walked with a fawn. They had no name.
Nor girl, nor beast, nor growing things. Plants stood
Things flew and rustled. They were all the same.
Quiet was there, indifferent, good,
Stupidly good, like that disguised Snake
In the First Garden, where the First Man
