The Heroes' Welcome by Louisa Young

uncertainties of the war years she had taken comfort in calling it home. But now the underlying message lay there like a crushed snail underfoot: she was the poor relation –
which was sort of true –
and she’d better mind her step. He had never said, or implied, any such thing before,
ever – he had always been the kindest man, the funniest companion, most loving cousin …
    When he said that – ‘in his own house’ and ‘some bloody woman’ – Rose felt slapped. She left the room, and went upstairs with her feet odd on the steps, and an aerated feeling in her arms. Peter, her generous sweet cousin, friend of her youth, companion of her heart – he would not –
but he just had. He had. Hadn’t he?
    And then she sat on her bed for a while, wondering if she was overreacting, and why she didn’t understand Peter at all any more, and what she could do to make things easier for him, and whether perhaps it was, well, not her
fault
,
of course she was not responsible for what had happened at Loos, which seemed, really to be the beginning of where he started going wrong, not that he’d talked about it, but she’d seen the lists of the dead, and how many had been his men.
    We cannot ever know, but that doesn’t mean we can’t help
,
she told herself
. Don’t mind one thoughtless comment.
    What was he thinking, to say that?
    Oh, he wasn’t thinking. It was the drink talking.
    But a man chooses to get drunk. Doesn’t he?
    At least, he could choose not to. Couldn’t he?
    But alongside her hurt impatience, she felt a deep, naked sympathy. There had been such suffering. And there was Tom, little white-haired, milk-skinned Tom with his furious eyes and his great silences, wandering the house, lurking in the hall by the elephant-foot umbrella stand, watching, growing, needing …
He misses Nadine. She was so sweet with him.
    Rose recalled, suddenly, a day when Tom had called Nadine ‘Mummy’. Julia had tried to laugh it off, and Nadine had been mortified, and Tom had not known what he had done wrong … Later Julia had said, ‘Well, it’s all in the genes, isn’t it? Clearly I’m going to be as foul a mother as my mother was. Girls like me shouldn’t have children,’ and Rose had wanted to slap her, and Julia had noticed and wept and gone and got Tom and carried him off into her dim bedroom and hugged him nearly to death when he had already forgotten all about it and just wanted to play with his ball.
    Time is flying by and they are all suffering. There has been so much silence,
and it is so hard to tell if it is the silence of healing rest, of peace and contemplation, or the silence of fear and loneliness, emptiness and pretending … Are they dying there behind their closed doors? Or dealing with it all in their own way, taking the time it takes?
    Should I be doing something? Something else?
    In a way, Peter being foul gives me permission to leave, if I get the scholarship. But in another way, it’s another reason why I have to stay with him. He’s so helpless he can’t even be nice.
    But I want to go. I want to live my own life.
    But—
    Is it pride and nothing else, to want to stand around with the men, with my notes and my professional judgement, and have other people act on my instructions, when my family needs me here?
    Then she told herself that this was their own storm, and would work itself out its own way, no matter how much she threw herself at the stone walls surrounding it. Then she told herself that it was selfish of her to want to leave – if she got the chance – when they were all so helpless. Then she told herself it was arrogant to think she could help by staying.
Then she thought of Tom again, and asked herself,
if I leave, I will create a vacuum, and who’s to say if either of them will be able to expand to fill it?
And finally she said:
Go to sleep, Rose. It’s not your fault. He’s not your husband. She’s not your wife. He’s not your son.
    It was not, in the end, Peter’s