Free The Heroes' Welcome by Louisa Young Page A

the city of lovers and I am not an old-fashioned girl. I know what I am missing …
    It seemed to her that the balance of blessing and curse on a marriage was a strange and arbitrary thing. Here they were, together, alive, healthy –
because damage is not illness
. Sane, of good sense and rational optimism. Each in love with the other. And yet.
    She knew that Europe – the world – was littered with widows – and widowers too – with shell-shocked husbands and victims of this terrible flu, with the syphilitic and those still croaking for air long after being gassed – and with couples lost to each other, or scared of each other, or who hated each other. She thought of Peter and Julia, of Sybil Ainsworth, widow to Riley’s friend Jack, with her four children up in Wigan, of Rose and the thousands of women who would never now know the joys and perils of matrimony at all – though to be honest, Rose didn’t seem to mind as some women did …
oh aren’t Riley and I better off than so many?
    Yes, yes of course.
    And yet here I am on honeymoon in the city of lovers, where couples kiss on the street, and despite all the blessings of my marriage I cannot be kissed.
    *
    Riley applied himself most thoroughly. To rowing, to admiring turtles, to improving his shaving technique, to French verbs, to newspapers, to ideas about his future, to planning who he would approach about jobs when they got home, to the names of the stars and of the streets of Paris, and most of all to not looking at Nadine too often or for too long, not catching her eye, not brushing against her.
    Is this why men drink?
he wondered.
Is this what sends them to brothels?
    But I don’t want to drink, and I don’t want any other girl …

Chapter Six
    Locke Hill, April–May 1919
    One night Julia, drunk on desperation, the shiftiness of spring, and the scent of magnolias on the breeze, fuelled by a faith in masculine desire and the disinhibition of her husband’s perpetual inebriation, made a final, very direct attempt at reconciliation. In a way, when she entangled her negligéed body with his semi-comatose drunken one on his study couch, ignoring his whisky breath, rubbing her breasts on his stubbly face, unlatching the trousers he hadn’t changed for days, murmuring, still, of love, she succeeded. Sex, of an instinctive, semi-conscious kind, was achieved, and affection was there, a sort of bewildered, ancient warmth. At the end she gazed hopefully. She was embarrassed by how inappropriate her radiance might be. And yet again, despite the fact that he was incapable of any such thing, physically, mentally, or emotionally, she allotted to him the stroke of authority and the right to decide about their marriage, their future and their love.
    He did weep, which was promising. She wept too. But he had no answer for her increasingly desperate pleas for reassurance, or a declaration about the future, or something.
    ‘I don’t know,’ he said, over and over. And finally: ‘Stop asking me.’
    She went back up to her bed. It was not mentioned afterwards, and their eyes did not meet.
    *
    Soon after, early one morning, Peter left. He didn’t tell his wife he was going, and Rose only found out because Mrs Joyce heard Max barking at the station taxi as it went down the drive.
    ‘But where’s he gone?’ asked Rose, who was about to leave for the hospital.
    ‘I don’t know,’ said Mrs Joyce, bewildered. ‘Millie was about to bring him his breakfast.’
    They just stood by the front door, honeysuckle dangling about them from the porch, the sky clear and blue and beautiful above them.
    Upstairs, a window was thrown up.
    ‘What’s going on?’ cried Julia, her voice carrying down.
    Rose and Mrs Joyce glanced at each other. ‘I’ll go up,’ Rose said.
    ‘What on
earth
is going on?’ Julia called again, and somewhere inside the house Tom’s young voice called out, ‘What on
earth
is going on?’ (At this Rose felt her heart slip down sideways, and