A Process in the Weather of the Heart.
London again.
In Wales, the sea-swept myriad of colours and high winds and low houses had sounded low and booming, like the shells.
So many colours. The colour of leaves, of sky, of water, of earth and flowers, of clothes and ornaments.
He had forgotten what colour was, what it meant and how it stung of life.
Still. The waves were exploding shells in his ears.
In London it was the rat-a-tat-tat, always, always, of a hundred guns at once. Beating out the rhythm of quick life and quicker death. People rushing across a stretch of land, back and forth, and then dying. Dropping like flies or vermin back into the abyss where nothing touched you, not even filth, not even fear. The war was over, but the spirit of it lingered like a grimy fingerprint, like a layer of bloodied dirt over the city. People were there and then they weren't. Every day, new people whom he might never see again. Every day the same fleeting, meaningless rush. Every day scuffling past him like vermin, sharp and fanged and sly, and then gone. He was trapped in moments, in the moments of life that escaped him before he could find rest or meaning in them, that echoed of nothing when he put his head on the same pillow and prepared himself for the same nightmares.
Endless nightmares. The only things that really took their time in London.
Harry with the sawn-off arm was a frequent visitor. Each night the thick crimson splurged from his raw stump and he was screaming inhuman screams. Each night the other soldiers glared at William with eyes that called him coward. Each night they all died too, in the field, while he stood waiting to hear the court's verdict. His entire regiment wiped out.
He would wake drenched, bolting upwards as though from a grave, stretching his eyelids so far back that they hurt.
If it hurt it meant he was real. This was real. The dark muffled room and Vera's voice.
She meant it to be soothing. He recoiled from her always.
How did she dare speak?
How did she dare tell him that it was alright, that everything was alright, that it was just a dream?
It was never going to be just a dream again.
That night before he was called away – the vague images overshadowed by fear of the unknown, and the paranoia of her disloyalty – that had been just a dream. He had come back into the world and been thankful of the sunlight, the smoothness of her skin, the softness of her words. Those horrors were neither confirmed nor tangible.
Now he came back into the world to remember those horrors that had happened. That could never be escaped.
He had never talked about them to her. Not the war. Not her affair.
After the trial he had spoken nothing but kindness.
Thoughts soured within him instead.
She couldn't work, she was a mother. After some time on welfare he managed to get into reconstruction. There was a lot needed doing, and the labour was hard. The days were a tangle of rubble and ladders, lifting and securing, cementing and drilling. It numbed him, the swift rushing days that echoed of nothing but rat-a-tat-tat and hammer blows and metal. He would retire to their flat and wash away the sweat and brick dust, spend an hour with his son, and fall to bed hoping he would be too exhausted to dream. It was an existence more than a life, and the panic of those fleeting days choked him, but he would take it over anything that left room for thought. Thoughts were dangerous. He had thought far too much about things before the night he almost murdered the Thomas's.
It was in the moments just before he slept that he really felt his life ringing hollow and hasty. That he thought of tomorrow and shivered though the bed was warm with Vera's body. He thought of her body and did not shiver at all, not even for excitement. As weeks merged into months he finally began to realise that he didn't – couldn't – love her again.
Sorry as she was, pained as she was, she had still done it.
She had never told him exactly how many times, or when. But she had done it.
And it had always been there, from the beginning, this love for Dylan, this childish adult love, this preference.
I'm not saying I'm a better man, but I'm not married.
No harm will ever come to you. Not from me, not from anyone else. And while I'm here, no word of mine will ever hurt you.
No word of mine will ever hurt you.
He had made somebody unequivocally his first choice, when he was her second.
He had made her love him when she wanted to love Dylan.
The poet, not the hero.
The war had done more than distort his soul. It had distorted hers. Guilt had made her love him, want him. Loneliness had put the knife into her hands and aimed it at his back, between the ribs. But she had been the one to thrust.
Now she loved him with all the love of a traitor.
And that had been alright, for a time.
Now it was too much.
Too much.
He didn't love her. He didn't make love to her. She took it all with her dark-eyed patience and her pallid guilt and her female love that could be so soft when she wanted, but was edged underneath. The bitterness of that edge remained in his past like a rip across the fabric of his consciousness. Always there, always sore.
Soon his work would be gone, when London was whole again. Perhaps he would be whole too, when this city was itself. When he had finished mending the voids in its consciousness, perhaps his own would heal over too.
He doubted it.
For now, there was money. The flat didn't cost much though the baby did. But always some spare money. She never asked him for it now. Not since that trip to the bank, when he had discovered just how contentedly she had been living off his soldier's pay. She never asked him for a penny.
At first he liked surprising her. A new dress. A new outfit for the boy. A treat for dinner.
Then the nights began to turn on him. He couldn't sleep with her body lying there, so shameful and riddled with history next to him in their sham marriage bed. He wasn't tired enough to just drop off. He wasn't tired enough to evade the nightmares, not even for one night in a week. And always her voice at the end, quiet, controlling, caressive.
He began to make friends at work so that he could go to the places they went at the day's end.
Making friends. It came so easily to him. All he had to do was pretend that he was still that cocky, carefree lad in uniform. The soldier who had never fought. The silver-tongued slick young chap who asked ladies if they had dropped their hankies.
They enjoyed drinking. So did he after his first night out, wonderfully subdued and serene. Nothing like the lunatic he had been on that night. No more spirits. Just good heavy ales to dull the senses, dull the feeling in his fingertips and his gut. Ales rocked him to sleep in a pleasant giddiness of sheets and pillows and a wife he no longer noticed. She soon gave up trying to bring him back to her. She knew that she deserved it, that it didn't matter what manner in which they were together, so long as they were together. So long as she was tied to him in her guilt and her penance and her mistaken devotion.
Until one night, when his work mates decided that alcohol wasn't enough.
There was a band round abouts tonight. A dance hall.
He'd love it. He'd have such a roaring time.
He had to come, he had to.
She'd never know.
That was the night that everything changed. The night that he saw her.
The night that he first clapped eyes on Daisy Grey.