‘Before the war, a fellow of standing was expected to be a gentleman of leisure; but things have changed, Reuben. Get a wife and then think about a job — that’s what I have to say on the matter.’ Feeling that he’d done his bit and shown Reuben the way forward, he stood up. ‘I think I’m done in.’
‘I must find it,’ mumbled Reuben, ‘then I can create instead of destroy.’
‘What’s that? Oh that thing you keep mumbling about — that thing you say is in your head? Have another whisky, Reuben — that’ll fix your head.’
Reuben put his glass down and started to get up. He glimpsed one of the maids scurrying past the door. He wondered why she was about the halls so late, perhaps she was waiting for him. She wouldn’t be the first maid to hide in a dark corner, her back pressed to the wall, waiting for him to pass. It was close on midnight. Reuben smiled. Being with a woman was the only time he felt like his old self. When he was with a woman and his skin was hot and moist, his muscles hard and unyielding, his breath ragged and urgent, he forgot everything and it was bliss. He forgot he was in a nasty hotel, or pushing her up against a cold stone wall in a dark and dreary lane, or letting her share his bed in his timbered room. He forgot her but most of all he forgot those damned voices and the explosions in his head. For the moments he was with a woman, he had silence — pure, beautiful, rare silence. He slapped Holmes on the back.
‘See you in the morning, Holmes — you know your way to the guest bedroom.’
When he heard Holmes’s footsteps recede up the stairs and his door close, he made his own way up the staircase. As he went up the second flight the maid was coming down it. It was unusual to see a maid on this staircase, the servants had their own stairs, but everything had changed since the war and Reuben had drunk too much and was too exhausted by life to question it. His eyes settled on the starched apron stretched over her breasts. She blushed and lowered her head in a way Reuben found irresistible. He made sure that he brushed lightly against her body as they passed each other and smiled to himself when she gasped. He kept going but she was delicious and sweet and he needed her, so he turned and she was waiting for him.
He took her hand and led her to his room and once inside the room he lifted her up and laid her on the bed. As soon as he started to make love to her, to taste her, to kiss her, the screaming of dying men, the explosions of bombs, the images of flying earth and flesh died away, and he had peace. But as soon as he’d had her and had rolled away to light a cigarette, those ruddy voices were back and with them came the guns and the barbed wire and the body pieces and he felt miserable again. He sat on the edge of the bed and shoved his fingers in his ears and shook his head. She sat behind him and put her head on his shoulder, and that was when he remembered that he’d better ask what her name was, because he was, after all, a gentleman.
‘Alice, sir,’ she said, straightening her uniform.
‘Alice, sir,’ he repeated, and he kissed her on the cheek and pulled her to him so that she was folded into his lap and she put her head against his heart and the quietness drifted back in and she thought that he must love her to kiss her so sweetly.
‘Marry me, Alice,’ he whispered, and she smothered him in kisses saying yes over and over.
Saturday, 9 October 1920, when Reuben’s future is discussed at length.
‘You’re marrying to spite me,’ said his father, pacing from one end of his study to the other. Reuben’s mother, Lisbet, sat staring at the ground. Reuben thought what opposites they were: his father pacing and prowling, ready to pounce, and his mother barely moving at all.
‘Yes, yes, I suppose I might be, but what does it matter? I eventually have to marry someone and this someone is carrying my child, so that seems a good enough reason to me.’ It could work, he thought, people married for less. Maybe the chatter of a wife would drive away the voices in his head. Maybe the gnawing futility would disappear.
His father fired up a cigar and passed one to him. His mother wasn’t offered a cigar — or whisky, for that matter. Doran had poured one for himself and one for Reuben, but assumed Lisbet, being a woman, wouldn’t drink during the day even if the occasion called for a stiff shot. But Reuben knew, because his mother had told him one night after she’d had several sherries, that when Doran was out of the house she snuck into his study, took a fat cigar out of its silver case, poured herself a whisky and sat in his favourite chair overlooking the garden and pretended everything was hers to do with as she wished.
Reuben watched as Doran paced from the floor-to-ceiling bookshelf on one side of the room to the stern portrait of his father on the other and back again.
‘You’ve been back from the war for, what? Nearly two years, and in that time you’ve done bugger-all. You don’t even have proper interests.’ Doran growled and puffed out smoke, making a noise like a horse.
Reuben thought bugger-all was a strong word to use in front of his mother.
‘Well, Doran, you have to remember that Reuben does have one particular interest,’ said Lisbet and smiled to herself. She was pleasantly shocked that she came
