Free The Heroes' Welcome by Louisa Young

him. He stirred and half woke,
under the strength of my stare
,
she thought, and he hoicked himself up and looked at her.
    ‘My dear,’ he said, and then thought for a while, and said something more – but his mouth was always clumsier after sleep, and also the moonlight was off his face now, and she could not see him to understand him. It had been interesting, academically, to learn that she needed to read his face, but it was not easy, not helpful to the confidences of the pillow and the encouraging sympathies of the dark. She shook her head, and didn’t want to say, ‘I can’t understand you,’ and terribly wanted to kiss him, because that would tell him …
    Does it show, that I want to kiss him?
    He smiled at her, and for a moment she thought – but then he scruffled her wild hair, and pulled her down to him, in a friendly way, an innocent way, which made it perfectly clear.
    She smiled bravely in the dark.
Is this it?
    The trouble is, the subject only arises – think of the vulgar joke he’d make about that! – in the dark, and in the dark is just where we can’t talk about it. Even if we could. Even if talking about it was what we needed to do. Which …
    You must accept it. In sickness and in health. This is what you signed up for.
    But we have never had any health
,
a wailing voice inside cried out, and a clammy feeling settled over her
– this is what you signed up for …
    But we’re young!
    *
    Dear God
, he’d thought.
She doesn’t know what she’s doing. How close that was!
Even as he’d tried to stop that gaze, to stop her looking at him like that … wanting her so much, wanting to make clear that she didn’t have to worry about that from him, that he would never …
    Oh, fuck.
    *
    By the second week Riley suggested they hungered for culture. Nadine was quick to agree, and they went back to Paris, where it was she who went to every gallery and every great building, and sought out the collections which had been put away for safety, and found the man who had the key to the closed corridor or the right to let her behind the scaffolding of the restorations. Nadine it was who stared at the light over the Seine for an hour at a time, smiling at the gold and grey.
    Riley, meanwhile, read French newspapers, observed French life, watched the French responding to peace, listened to French conversations, and made Nadine talk French to him. Despite the pronunciation problems, he was rather quick to learn. ‘
J’aime parler français,
’ he said. ‘
C’est nouveau pour ma bouche. Les mouvements sont bon
– exercise.
Comment on le dit?
Exercise?
Pour le
rehabilitation.’ She was proud of him. It was exhausting being with him, watching his determination.
    One hot afternoon, they walked together to the elegant little street behind the Place des Vosges where Nadine’s mother’s family had lived. Nadine had been here a year before, in 1918, when she had been mad with grief and exhaustion.
    ‘I don’t even know where my grandparents are buried,’ she said. ‘Any of these men in hats could be my relatives, and I wouldn’t know! I thought Jewish families were meant to keep close.’ She told him the story Jacqueline had told her, of the Pereire brothers who had built the railways and financed Haussman in building the boulevards, and how one of them had married the other’s daughter. At the age of sixteen Mademoiselle Pereire had become Madame Pereire, her uncle’s wife, and later there was a rose named after her.
    They stood outside number seventeen and admired its red bricks and decent windows. They were good houses, prosperous and elegant.
    ‘I don’t know why it isn’t my mother’s still,’ she said.
    ‘Will you knock, and ask?’
    ‘No,’ she said. ‘I’ll ask my mother, when we get home. It’s interesting.’
    Interesting!
She heard herself say it, and she wanted to scream.
Yes, it’s interesting. But. Family history is not a proper occupation on a honeymoon. I am on honeymoon in