My Dear I Wanted to Tell You by Louisa Young Page B

only of where I am going. My self retreats, my focus is narrow. My body does what has to be done.
While I was at Dover last week that condition of mind receded a little, and I thought clearly, as a human being. But such luxuries are not for the Front. This is the last evening when my mind and heart are engaged. I have kept them open in order to be able to say this to you. To tell the truth, I don’t want you to know about this kind of thing. But not telling you seems like a form of death, a death of the heart, or the mind, or the spirit. There are more ways than the physical to die, which I never knew before. I have learnt it this year. I do not care to think what else I shall learn as the war continues. As clearly it must.
We return to the Front Line tomorrow. I am going back under and I will not write again. Pray that I come up again, and my darling be there to help haul me out at the end, if I make it –
    Oh, dear I shouldn’t have written that.
    Well, fuck it. Fuck it. That’s how I feel.

Chapter Six
    London, August 1915
    The letter, the first since the Christmas card, was sent on by her mother, with a note on the back in swirling, elegant writing: ‘Have you an admirer? Tell all!’
    Not likely. Not after the look on your face when you gave me the first letter, the oh-Nat-I’m-just-going-to-war-’bye-then letter. The stupid stupid stupid unkind letter. Not after you said: ‘It’s probably for the best, darling. I know you liked him but you know he’s not the sort of boy . . .’
    Oh yes he is the sort of boy, he is EXACTLY the sort of boy. He is THE boy.
    Liked. In the past. Thanks for that little extra, Mother.
    Followed by the Christmas card which might as well have been from someone’s uncle they hardly knew . . .
    Nadine was not able to say, either to her mother or to herself, that her mother was wrong and she was right and Riley was everything, everything he should be. Because he wasn’t. He was – he had somehow turned into – someone to whom she could only write those stupidly cheerful notes. If she could write at all. Was it distance? Was it the fact of words on paper, uncomfortable, unchangeable? Was it whatever had happened that had made him leave so suddenly? Was it whatever was happening out there, which she couldn’t ask about, which he wasn’t writing to her about?
    But that moment, in the studio, when he had turned to her, and she had turned, and there was that moment when she had thought, for a second of absolute bewildering thrill, that he was going to kiss her, and he hadn’t but he had put his hand . . . and that moment when they had looked at each other, and then, just then, for that moment . . . wasn’t he everything? Wasn’t it all true, just true, and possible, and true?
    Like the Donne . . . eye beams twisting . . .
    And Papa had said, There’s nothing you can do about it . . .
    And the heart was true, and the heat, in that moment, with his hand on her waist and that big old pinafore, the hyacinth smell, that morning, was a promise. They had made a promise then. They had. They had. That touch, that surge, that look.
    The entire autumn, no one mentioned him to her. She had wanted to ask. She had lain in bed wondering who best to ask, going round in circles. And when she had asked, she learnt nothing. Her family had heard nothing from him. Sir Alfred had had only a card when Riley was in training. She had asked Terence, who had rather embarrassedly said, no, he hadn’t heard from the old boy. She had been tempted to visit Mrs Purefoy – she had even got her coat on to go to their house – but having already written for his address she grew embarrassed; overcoming the embarrassment she couldn’t find the street; having found the house she grew embarrassed again at its smallness, so she decided to write after all; and having written she received no reply; and thus ignored she retreated into humiliated confusion and did not know what to do.
    During a drawing lesson in the studio